Africa (26th)
Attila (12th)
Carcassonne (19th)
Cash (5th)
Evo (5th)
Girl Genius: The Works (5th)
Halali / Tally Ho (12th)
Hare & Tortoise (19th)
Igel Ärgern (12th)
Limits (26th)
Money (19th)
Sahara (26th)
Show Manager (12th)
Tante Tarantel (19th)
Tonga Bonga (12th)
Torres (12th)
Und Tschüss (12th)
Wanted (19th)
Wyatt Earp (19th)
I arrived too late to catch the first game. This was Cash, a game that I have but have never played. Players have a hand of coloured 'key' cards and there are a number of 'safe' cards laid out, each requiring a combination of four coloured keys to 'open' and worth varying amounts of points. On your turn, you can pick up a key or open any number of safes, using up the keys in the process. Result: MH, SG, GL, SG
Next up, we played Evo, the new game from Philippe Keyaerts of Vinci fame. This one is also about winning and holding territories but is quicker and lighter. The theme is of species of dinosaur, each of which need to evolve to cope with the changing climate and competition for space. The evolution is handled by gene chits that are added to a 'portrait' of the species. The genes are: fur to survive in the cold; parasols to survive heat; legs to increase movement; horns to increase fighting ability; eggs to increase reproductive rate; longer tails to increase initiative; and mutant genes which reduce the cost of future genes.
Each round consists of a climate change (probably) followed by each player trying to move their dinosaurs from the now hazardous spaces on the board to the safer ones (e.g. dinosaurs cannot survive on the hot beaches when the climate is hot). Competition for spaces can get quite intense as only one dinosaur is allowed on any space, so going first is an advantage, as is being good at fighting or being able to move a long way. After moving, each player adds some new dinosaurs depending on the number of egg genes they have. Then any destroyed by the climate are removed before the remaining ones are scored at one 'mutation' (victory) point each.
After that a number of new genes are put up for auction - as many as there are players, so everyone will get one. The auction mechanism is great: taking it in turns, players bid what they like for a gene that takes their fancy. This can be from 0 upwards as long as it beats any bid already made on that gene (as there are as many genes as players, you can always get something for nothing). If you beat someone's bid on a gene, that player must reposition their bid immediately such that it is the highest bid on a gene - this may lead to someone else having to re-bid, etc. I find this mechanism great - it is easy to understand and you can always get something for nothing, so there are always alternatives to your plans and you are not stifled by being outbid. The amount you bid is subtracted from your mutation points but should aid your survival in the next round.
The other aspects of the game are a meteor marker and event cards. The meteor marker moves along a track until close to the earth and then a die is rolled each turn, with increasing odds, ensuring that the last turn is hard to predict exactly. The event cards are, basically, rule variations that are played when they will help you or hinder or your opponents. They are gained in the same way as new genes, apart from the three that are dealt to each player at the start. Good event card play can turn a game to your favour.
A number of different strategies were used by various players depending on which genes they managed to get. I followed the path of high initiative so that I could move first each turn and get into those contested spaces. Mick got a couple of mutation genes and was then able to save a lot of points in further auctions. Garry pursued a warlike approach by getting horns - it didn't help him a lot, though, as combat is resolved by die roll depending on your horn advantage and he soon demonstrated to us how bad he is at die rolling. At one stage he almost wiped himself out by attacking others - although another good aspect of the game is that it is quite easy to grow your 'herd' back up to strength. As for Steve, he seemed to have a little of everything. A great game that I'd like to play again soon. Result: SG, TC, SG, MH, GL.
Steve took Sophie back home at this point and the rest of us didn't have much time. So we had a quick try of Girl Genius: The Works. This is a card game from Cheapass based on the Girl Genius comic book characters - no, I haven't seen them either, but I'm looking out in the 'alternative' comic shops. Unlike most Cheapass games, this is one with very high production standards and the artwork on the cards is very attractive, featuring characters and robots from the stories. The game layout of a grid of cards is meant to represent life as a machine (called The Works) with all the characters on the cards as cogs in that machine.
In the game, you turn cogs (cards), causing other cards to 'pop' - when they are removed, their instructions followed and they are added to your score pile. First to 100 wins. It is quite hard to see all of what is going on, or what the repercussions of your moves will be. This may come with experience or it may be that three is too many players until you are used to it. The game is meant to be for 'two or more'. I need to play more to get a clear idea on how good it is, but the attractiveness and the interesting characters on the cards should ensure that I give it those playings. Result (cut short): TC, GL, MH.
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I took my brother John along this time after warning him that there might be an overload of children - it being the Easter holidays. We found the adults and just one child playing Und Tschüss. It's a shame to have missed it as I like to play this game with large numbers. Another occasional visitor, Paul Oakes, was among them. Result: MH+SG, GL, PO, NC.
At the other table, Geoff appeared to be under siege from hordes of small girls, although on closer inspection there were only four of them. They were playing Attila and he showed an appropriately Attila-like lack of mercy in taking them to the cleaners. Result: GC, CL, SG, SC, RL.
The Und Tschüss table broke up and we poached a couple to play Tonga Bonga. I really do like this game from Stefan Dorra (as long as you've got four players). I started off well, getting to two islands ahead of anyone, but then a well placed attack by Garry meant that I reached the next island third. This left three of us battling it out pretty much neck and neck until the end of the game. At that point John gave up at least a joint first place by hanging about near Tonga Bonga island instead of ending the game. This allowed Garry to get to another island and steal the win. Drat! Result: GL, TC, JC, NC.
We followed this with a game of Show Manager, Dirk Henn's game of producing stage shows. Garry made a bit of a mess with his first production by forgetting that you couldn't discard useless cards. Which made it all the more surprising that he went on to win by a huge margin. I think the rest of us suffered from a lot of trying to put on the same show at the same time, so forcing up the prices for those shows. Of course, it may have nothing to do with that and may be purely down to Garry's skill. Stranger things have happened - even if I can't think of any at the moment. Results: GC, NC, TC+JC.
Meantime, the others played Torres (result: SG, MH, PO), Igel Ärgern and Halali / Tally Ho.
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It's still the Easter holidays so we still had four children as well as the four adults. Also a bit of a coincidence tonight: both Garry and I had both taken along copies of Hare & Tortoise. At first I was going to join the game just started by Garry with the three girls - although we'd have had to replace his four player set with my six player one (there have been many versions of this classic game, including a brand new one from Amigo). To keep the balance of groups though, I joined the other three and left Garry to give the girls a trouncing. Result: GL, RL, NC, SC.
So I joined Geoff, Steve and Jonathan, who restarted their game of Carcassonne so that I could join in. We played this last on 8th March (see then for a description), although I did much better this time than then. As is usual with this game there was a battle of field ownership going on all the time that other points were being scored. Steve and I both had two farmers in the main field for much of the game. Near the end, however, Steve persuaded Jonathan to place a tile that allowed him to join up a third farmer, so gaining sole control of the field. Neither I nor Geoff were able to regain any power in that field, although we shared another one that turned out to have nearly as many points as the main one. This left the game to be decided by the large number of big towns that Geoff had people in and the long road snaking across the board that he and Jonathan shared. Result: GL, TC, SO, JO.
After this, we decided to play Tante Tarantel, Doris and Frank's game of bugs in a spiders web. Garry, however, told us that they were about to finish Hare and Tortoise, so we waited a few minutes. Geoff and Steve spent the time starting to fill in answers to my birthday quiz. I have got into the habit of providing a quiz each year - this year the subject is popular music performers and the clue types vary from straight to quiz to cryptic. Everybody who's having a go seem to be enjoying it and if you're reading this page and want to have a go, send me an e-mail.
Anyway, once Garry finished, he said he was going to play Wyatt Earp, a new game he had got. I wavered over joining him because no-one else at my table knew how to play Tante Tarantel and I didn't have the energy to give an explanation that I couldn't add to as I played. Garry leapt in, though, to explain the rules quickly to the others so that Nicki and I could swap places. I still kept thinking of other things as they played and would shout across to the other table asking if Garry had told them this or that rule. Despite all this, we still managed to not get over a fundamental rule about the spider only moving once per round. They had the spider moving once for each player's turn - four times as often. Consequently they were all wiped out pretty quickly and Jonathan was the only one to get a bug out of the web. They then restarted with the correct rule and had a longer game with a more even result. Result: SO, NC, JO+GC.
While they were doing this, we got underway with Wyatt Earp. This was due to be released as part of the Mystery Rummy series and it certainly bears some similarities to Jack the Ripper, which is the only game I have of the series. Basically, this production has resulted in it getting a bigger, prettier box and cardboard chits for money/points. The theme is that of capturing Wild West desperado type bad guys, although that theme doesn't really intrude on the rummy game itself. There are about eight wanted posters laid out, showing the bad guys in question and the price on each head is set at the beginning by placing a $1000 chit on each. Players are dealt ten cards each and follow the normal rummy actions of draw, meld, discard until someone discards their last card. When drawing, you can either take the top card from the discard pile or the top two cards from the draw pile. The minimum meld is of three evidence cards featuring one of the bad guys (i.e. in a single suit). Once that has been played, any player can play one or more cards of that suit. The price on the head of the relevant bad guy goes up whenever more than one card of that suit is melded.
Various special cards - only one of which can be played per turn - add points to melds and chits to the price on the head, make other players' melds score zero, free up your own melds, etc. These cards all have cowboy type names and descriptions and many of them require a 'shooting' to succeed. This merely involves turning over a card from the deck to see if it has a bullet-hole drawn on it - most of them do, unless it is Garry doing the shooting... As soon as someone discards their last card, the hand is over and each of the suit are assessed. If there are less than eight points of melds in play for that suit, it is discarded and the price on that head is carried forward to the next hand. Otherwise, the price on the head is shared among those players within four points of the highest player in that suit - with higher points getting preference during the distribution.
And that's about it - you play until someone has $25000 in collected bounties. Playing with two young girls didn't necessarily show it in it's best light, as Rebecca in particular had trouble with the rummy concepts and soon got bored with it. The girls generally were having much more fun with events like my mobile phone going off over the other side of the room and me having to go and get it - and the way I answered it sent them into fits of laughter. Speaking on the phone, I commented that I was surrounded by giggling girls. This just made matters worse as one of the people I was surrounded by was Garry. Naturally, I apologised to Garry for any insinuation that he was a giggling girl, but this just seemed to make matters worse with the other two.
Anyway, back to the game. Altogether it seemed a good rummy (I like rummies) with a thin theme. It is of the quality of Jack the Ripper, but I'm not sure if there are enough differences to make you buy both unless you really like rummies. It also took us a long time and we had to cut it short at the end of the evening with a close three way battle for the lead and Garry trailing miserably, complaining about never managing to shoot successfully. The time will probably improve with older players and familiarity. Result: TC, RL+SC, GL.
On the other table, they followed up Tante Tarantel with Money (Result: SO, GC, NC, JO) and Wanted. This latter is a fun reaction game (see 15th March) and was creating much shouting and laughter from that table, exacerbating the feeling of the girls at our table that they were in the wrong game. Result: NC, SO, GC, JO.
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Garry had received an order from Adam Spielt today and had brought it along to the club to show off to us. I arrived to find Mick, Steve G, Geoff and him playing Limits, which had obviously caught his attention when I brought it in last month (see 8th March). I can see this being a regular popular choice at the club. I just joined in as they were playing, which immediately put me well ahead of Steve. The game battled on with Garry and me vying for the lead most of the time. Steve, on the other hand, got very little challenge for last place and took it with a storming -10 points. Geoff, his nearest competitor, had only -1 points and was much closer to my winning score of +1! Steve commented "Stupid game!". Result: TC, MH+GL, GC, SG.
Next on the menu was Reiner Knizia's latest big box game, Africa. I had been itching to buy this, but decided to hold off until I had played Garry's copy. The game mechanics have little to do with the continent of the same name, but that theme adds some pretty components and an Africa shaped playing space. The map of Africa is split into small hexes and a round counter is placed face down on each space to start the game. The player pieces start at various points around the coast. Each turn you can either fly to any empty space on the continent or perform a move, act, move, act sequence. Each move is of one or two revealed spaces (you cannot move onto or over a face down counter) and one of the actions can be to turn over a counter next to your explorer.
The counters can be: animals, which score depending on how many similar animals are adjacent, but can be placed elsewhere on the board to increase that score; nomads, which are similar except that they score for the number of adjacent empty spaces; gold or gems, which score 1 or 2 points and stay where they are; artefact, which come in eight types and are removed from the board, possibly swapped with other players, and then accumulated for points at the end of the game; or monuments which stay where they are but allow that player an extra base camp.
Other actions that can be taken are: to move existing animals or nomads from adjacent to your explorer to anywhere they can score more, gaining the difference in points; or to build a base camp on an empty space. This latter action allows you to do one of two things: score a point for each animal, nomad or monument adjacent to the camp; or pick up any gold or gem counters adjacent to the camp; - not both. The gold and gems are saved until the end of the game when the highest two holders of either score 10 and 6 points respectively. As for the other action, one of the criticisms of the game is that it is not clear theme-wise how you get your newly discovered lion, giraffe, etc. from your explorer across the continent to join others already there - we speculated that the explorers must be strong enough to throw the hippos (or whatever) vast distances and, of course, for those animals to be none-the-worse for the experience.
As we had just punched out the counters for the game, we didn't seem to have sorted them very well as almost all the gold and gems were found to the north of the continent - particularly around Geoff's explorer, whilst in the south, where I was, there were loads of animals. In fact Geoff's ability at finding gold and gems was so good that I considered giving him a trowel and asking him to dig randomly in my garden - hoping he would dig up a fortune.
At the beginning of the game we all stayed pretty much close together on the scoring track, with players generally picking up between one and four points an action. Towards the middle, I pulled out a bit of a lead when I realised the importance of the base camps that scored for animals rather than the ones that picked up gold and gems and seemed to predominate in the early game. I had to build up quite a lead, though as Geoff was sitting on 20 points for his gold and gems and some of the others had good artefact scores to come. As I was trying to build the lead I set up a nice group of animals ready to place a base camp between them - only to have Steve fly in and take them from me! I was so annoyed about this that I pointed out a move for Mick to make the space useless before Steve could score from it - a rather unsporting move I grant you. Sorry, Steve - if you knew how much sleep I had lost over it...
Anyway, the game ended rather suddenly soon after that, catching all of us a little by surprise. We all had at least one base camp left unused, usually because we were hanging on for those really high scoring opportunities. I had three left, and I think that was the most. If I'd got to use just one of those (such as the one that Steve kept from me), I could have held my lead. As it was, Geoff surged ahead and passed me by two points and Garry did the same by one. Drat! Altogether, and after thinking it over, I think I enjoyed the game and look forward to playing it again. I think I mainly like the aspect of turning the counters over to see what you get and am mainly confused by the ability to hurl an elephant across the length of Africa. Result: GC, GL, TC, SG, MH.
We followed with an old game that was new to me, Sahara. This is a game I had swapped for Gambler with Nik Luker at Furrycon, and I was interested in finding out if I had lost a winner. The board consists of a twisting line of spaces from a dried out waterhole to a fresh oasis and each player has a number of camels to get from the one to the other, including a fatter camel that is worth double points. You also have a set of fifteen cards that you shuffle and deal out into three piles, turning the top one face up on each pile.
On your turn you can play a card from any of your piles and if you play the last in a pile, you shuffle all your cards and deal them again. The cards allow you a certain number of forward movement points to spread among your camels as you see fit or backward movement points to spread among other players' camels. In moving, you only count empty spaces, so you try to get your camels moving over long trains and then leave spaces behind them to avoid being leapfrogged. You also have two special cards: one allows you to move one of your camel to the space ahead of the leading camel and the other allows you to swap your fat camel with another.
The final eight spaces on the track are marked with values from eight to one and, as soon as they all contain a camel the game is over and those camels score for the spaces they are on. Due to a lack of clear thought and foresight, I managed to give Garry, on my left, a 26 point win compared to my 10 point second place, just ahead of Mick. Steve, sadly, failed to score any points and I asked if he wanted it recording as a "Stupid game!".
So, do I think I swapped away a good game? On the whole, yes, but I know it went to a good home and I'm happy with what I got for it. I think I'll keep hold of the next set I get, though. Result: GL, TC, MH, GC, SG.
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