Lancaster - 4 December 2013

An introduction for Stu to the excellent Lancaster for a 5-player games night at Adrian's.  This is a very well designed game where the theme (each player takes the role of a Lord in the service of Henry V) matches the mechanics perfectly.  There are only 5 turns, each of 3 phases, but the options and enjoyable complexity means that the game still takes a decent evening to play.  The only slight complaint is the down time for players with fewer knights to place when Andy, James and Adrian spend several rounds booting each other off the most lucrative spaces on the board.

The game admits of different tactics: Kieron took an early lead by bagging victory points from the counties; James started off going for Castle extensions but then switched to a strategy of collecting knights; Adrian did the reverse of that; Andy and Stu acquired high value Knights quite early on.  There was some intense voting where cunning use of voting cubes by James swung a crucial law onto the statute books.

The end result though favoured those that racked up the points for the end game scoring options and Kieron and Stu's early leads were surpassed.  Final scores: Adrian 78, James 77, Stu 52, Kieron 48, Andy 26.