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Anthony Boydell
United Kingdom
Unspecified
Unspecified
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Last night, almost postponed by an impressive 15 minute shower of snowflakes the size of kittens, I dared to show my face at the Ross-on-Wye board-game club for the first time in absolutely bloody ages (so it seems). The last time I played any games with Ben, John et al was at the excellent Cidercon in November – my, how time flies?
Clutching a newly de-sprewed Ora Et Labora (I took a 50 minute driving diversion to pick this up from my mate Jimmy on Thursday) and my Mountain Railway prototype, I was welcomed into the heaving bosom of the restaurant overflow room at the White Lion to find a 4pl St Petersburg already in full Tsarist flow (Ben, John, Becky and Bill – the latter sporting a moustache so full-bodied and fruity you’d be forgiven for thinking a stoat had nested in his filtrum!)
Anne was dithering for a game of something and Ian arrived shortly after me, so we set to Ablaze! – a cute, tile-laying filler with a nice theme and an admirably simple mechanic for representing fire buring out-of-control. Your turn = take a tile, unseen, and place it adjacent to the tiles in play that have a ‘total value’ that is the highest (each tile has a number on it and one, two or three ‘occupancy’ spaces); if there are multiple positions with the highest total, you choose. Then, place a dobber in your colour on any empty occupancy space…well, I say ‘any’, but you look at a tile and check it’s ‘occ space’ total vs free edges (edges with no tile abutting) and take the lowest of the two, then subtract dobbers already ON the tile and if it’s a total >=1 you can place there. The aim is to get chains of dobbers out to the edge of the playing area by game end (they will score the valie of the tile upon which they are smouldering) and there’s a mildly-irritating ‘divide by’ scoring rule for the outermost tile in each chain; most points wins.
It didn’t really set me on fire...(waits)
Now that we’d all reached a natural break, Ian suggested The Resistance – a game I have been keen to play for the longest time. The first game was over unusually-quickly with a win for the Resistance – our problem was when the traitors were eye-balling each other, only two out of three of us actually opened our eyes – John, in an excited fog, forgot that he was also a Company man through-and-through, so the whole thing descended into farce! He also remarked that despite me not going on ANY missions AT ALL and voting YES for the Leader, he knew I was the enemy because he ‘plays a lot of poker’. If my tell is that bloody obvious then I can’t play this game again (he wouldn’t tell me what it is).
I tried the second round wearing my coat on my head. Unfortunately, I was so self-conscious about giving/not giving anything away that I didn’t enjoy the next couple of re-runs – it seems my own body has excluded me from this interesting game. That’s that for The Resistance.
(secret) sad face.
Tiring of the lighter material, I’d wanted to suggest Uwe’s latest but we were now staring down the barrel of less than two hours of play and I didn’t fancy a teaching O&L taking us passed midnight. Instead, the seven broke up into a three for Batavia and a four for Troyes (me in the latter). I like Troyes a lot and it’s the least luck-driven dice game that I know with lots of tension and options. Unfortunately (that word again), we managed Heresy as an early event (everyone loses 2 influence) that was only defeated in the final round – this meant it was really hard to get extra people and, with me having no red dice at all, the Boydell standing militia was no bloody help at all. What I think is most admirable in the game is the element of self-fixing, so low men = higher income which means die-buying options are expanded. I was able to sustain a mini-Sculpter combo of turning one high white die into three equiv yellow dice into VPs. By itself, this was not strong enough, but had we not been bogged down in Heretical matters (and another event exiling two of my peeps out of the Church), I might have been able to pull off a parallel stream of event conquering etc. Ian played a blinding combination of well-timed activations and die-stealing (grrrrr! I was going to get THAT one!) to protect a 47, 39, 39 (me and Becky), 37 final tally.
It was cold outside, but it warmed the heart of my cockles to see such a good turnout this evening. Here’s to more gaming next week as I’ve now officially finished work for 2011...huzzah!
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