Navegador, 27 December

Navegador - Orhan's Xmas present to Adrian in 2010 - came out for post-Xmas games with Guest Gamers Fred and Felix. In this rondel-based game players take the role of Portuguese explorers trying to found colonies and exploit resources from Africa to Japan. There are various ways in which to acquire victory points, essentially optimising against the different categories of ships, buildings, colonies etc. Asymmetric play predominated from the start with Felix and Fred opting for early exploration and colony building, Adrian going for workers and factories and James and Orhan going for a balanced approach. Fred and Felix found themselves in very beneficial positions with nicely complementary colonies and factories - the one producing goods which the other could then process, playing the market very effectively. This led to the brothers generating vast amounts of cash which they could then use to buy more buildings and colonies. The game end for this game was initiated by all the buildings being built as the players specialised in the buildings that would lead to maximum victory points. The final scores were closer than we might have supposed, but still showed a commanding victory for Fred: Fred 98; James 89; Adrian 88; Orhan 70; Felix 67.

Small World - August 10th 2011

Another outing for Small World with guest gamers Fred and Felix. A great game ensued with Fred and David battling for the high scoring rounds, while Adrian seemed to be picking up the passed over combos, gaining lots of coins for his selections while not achieving a great deal with them. Felix did a good job of explaining to everyone why they should attack Fred instead of him, while Orhan who admitted this was a game he didn't seem to get reverted to attacking whoever attacked him last. Perhaps we could replace him with an AI next time...

By the end, Fred had a consistently high scoring empire of skeletons. David went for broke with commando giants which allowed him to conquer a large number of regions but left him completely exposed on the last turn. End result was Fred wins on 86, Adrian on 84, David 81, Felix 72 and Orhan 65.

Bumper Short Games Night, 30 May 2007 - Niagara, Gladiators and Ra

A fun evening of short games with guest 8 year-old gamer Fred. Two games of Niagara opened up the evening. The first saw James steal victory quickly by the deadly '4 amethyst grab' technique. Wise to this, game 2 was much more tactical. Some shrewd moves by Fred won the admiration of the adults; Kieron and James, both close to victory were swept over the waterfall by the raging torrent; Adrian pipped Fred to the finish and won with a double '4 diamonds' plus '7 any gems'.

We then tried out James' new Gladiator figure game. Quite a nice little system, and perfectly suited to Fred - who systematically murdered all our fighters to be last man standing (having personally wiped out his opponents). Happily for James, his gladiator was spared by the Emperor. Kieron and mine were given the 'pollice inverso' (turned thumb) for being feeble. Finally, we introduced Fred to Ra. A super game as ever, with the usual mix of Derrening, risk taking and entertainment. Kieron stormed to victory with 47 points (having scored big on green tiles each turn); Fred was second with 31, then Adrian with 30 and James last with 21. All in all a great evening, with all the players winning a game - and thus racking up a huge number of points towards the end of year scores.
:-)