Kingsburg - 10 October 2012

Round at Orhan's for a game of Kingsburg this week - blogged about a couple of times before but the first time Andy and I had tried it.  I enjoyed this game - it has a great mechanism which at first, looks like there is more luck in the game than there really is.  But looking at other players' dice rolls and trying to work out where they want to place and either block them or finesse the placing of your own dice to maximise your collection of resources makes it much more thoughtful.

Orhan took an early lead by building along the bottom rank culminating in an Embassy which accrued points every turn.  Andy took the holy approach building chapels and cathedrals which took him up to second place.  Kieron, David and James had a more balanced approach.  The last battle saw Andy's non-aggressive stance shaken and his cathedral was destroyed, sadly demoting him to last place in the final throw of the game.  Final scores: Orhan 50, David 39, James 37, Kieron 36, Andy 32.

This looks like a popular game with a lot of awards under its belt and a number of expansions, although none of those I looked at expand it beyond five players.

Kingsburg - 20th June 2012

Unluckily, only 3 rivals made it round for games this week.  Luckily for Kieron, this meant that he only had 2 people to out-roll in order to win.  As luck would have it, Orhan started with a series of unfortunately low rolls which stunted his ability to make the best of two rivals new to the game.  After the first year, Stuart was very unfortunate to be the only one to lose his battle which removed his chapel. Then, luckily for Kieron, it was Stuart's turn to have a series of unlucky rolls of '8' which he was unable to claim a mulligan on.  Kieron made the best of his fortunate rolling and made a collection of gold which enabled him to construct the best buildings on his card.  He risked all by not really concentrating on building an army and watched as lucky high rolls saved him in the battles.  So unsurprisingly, Kieron won with 42 points.  Orhan was unlucky to miss out with 41 and Stuart blamed it all on bad luck languishing on 31 points.  If only as many games had as much luck in them; Kieron would be assured a win every time ;-)

Kingsburg, 3 August

Summer holidays meant depleted Rivals this week, with Adrian, Deej and Orhan being joined by guest gamers Felix and Fred. We opted for Kingsburg, the rather clever influence-the-king's-advisors game which has a certain amount of luck (in the dice rolling) but lots of opportunities to adapt tactics to match. Orhan put his faith in the religious buildings, reasoning (correctly as it turned out) that their victory point contributions would more than compensate for the reduced opportunities to boost military strength. This paid off. Final scores: Orhan 40; Adrian 33; Fred 31; Deej 24; Felix 11.