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Anthony Boydell
United Kingdom
Unspecified
Unspecified
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Interrupting my August holiday to do some real work brought me back into the RADAR of my beloved Wycombe gaming group - most of whom have either left the country (Ray!), are about to (Iain! Jimmy!) or gone on holiday (Richard)!
Monday night may have offered some two-player goodness, but I wimped out with a caffeine-deficiency headache and two-thirds of Avatar on the XBMC to finish; an early night was in order.
Tuesday was a pre-arranged 'play-test' evening: Carl, Iain, myself and Richard Breese (*klong* - ahem, a little name-dropping there!) met at the Toby Carvery in Maidenhead for a run at Mr B's latest prototype - it's a card driven brain-massager with a superb integration of theme and mechanics (which is something that makes Reef Encounter such a joy for me).
(Obviously, I can't say any more but we'll be getting it to the test table again very soon - I'll see if he will let me 'leak'...)
The second half of the evening was devoted to a 4 player session of Mountain Railway, my worker-placement railway building game (see many other blog posts). I made a deliberate decision to avoid the 'extra actions' path of buying a train and ONLY LOST by 3 points to Mr Breese - not a large margin by any means and, satisfyingly, it proves that 'family growth' is not a 'no brainer'!
Talking of 'family growth', after another session of Mountain Railway with Carl yesterday (Wednesday) evening, during which his step-son diddled me out of 40VPs in the last two rounds, I got my first face-to-face farm festival for almost a week (how DO I manage? Answer = boiteajeux.net). Four of us sat down to the usual table-covering component feast and very quickly Blaine got himself to a double room build and family growth twice. As the youngest member of the group, Blaine needed a little help at this point so I stepped in and repeatedly emphasized how we needed to steal all the food to make his life difficult. Thankfully, being caring players and good guardians, they HEEDED my advice and hoovered all the good stuff up in the next round - he escaped with just the one begging card *grrrrrrr*.
For myself, the BRAGGART and CHARCOAL BURNER proved astonishing - the former working with the ridiculous number of Occupation-dependent BUT FREE Minor Improvements, to net me 25+ bonus points at the end of the game:
Most of the game I was content to hover at 3 family members, secure with an awesome Baker / Planter Box food-engine (bake at start of feeding phase after sowing two fields to get FIVE grain on each) - the others grew to four quicker, but ended up taking food actions to make it through the harvest. This was a pretty untypical game FOR ME what with ALL OF THOSE CARDS - Richard Clyne would be VERY proud of me (hi, RC)!
(note the distinct lack of ANY livestock)
I drove home at 9PM (90 minutes, drizzly and dark) and collapsed into bed - farming can be SO exhausting.
More of the same soon, I hope.
Side Note: Agricoholics Anonymous? Does it exist? Just sayin...
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