The first, and almost certainly last, outing for Ivanhoe - one of my random Bring & Buy purchases. The theme looked good (nobles attacking the castles of evil King John), the artwork was passable, but the game mechanics stank. When you conquered a castle, you didn't actually gain control of it. Instead the original player retained control and you joined a queue which, if it became long enough, effectively pushed the original owner off to the dungeon and the second in line took control. There was a little bit of swapping around, particularly at the end as you are forced by the game to attack if you can, but Orhan and Stuart deployed large armies early in the game to hold onto castles. Everyone who took a castle early held onto it until the end of the game, with just the small castle changing hands and giving me the win in the end as I was the last person with a big army and could take it over. Very disappointing. I'll double-check BGG to see if I had a duff translation of the German rules but otherwise, this is going back to the next Bring & Buy.
The second game was my much more successful B&B game of Pelopennes. In the process of explaining the rules to Stuart, I appeared to blank them from my mind shortly after, and consequently made error after error. Charitably, the boys game me a few Mulligans (and others benefited from the evening's generous spirit) but I couldn't make progress after missing so many opportunities. Everyone else had good solid games, particularly David who won with a population/prestige score of 42/27, followed by Orhan on 18/32, Stu on 18/26, Andy 18/24, Adrian 15/23 and me on just 9/16. It looked like Stu and Andy were going to share 2nd place with Orhan, until the latter pointed out the prestige score was used to resolve ties. I still love this game.
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