Love Letter & Ra - 7 May 2014

Stuart, Kieron and James met up for a last minute convened games night.  We played a couple of light games which allowed plenty of time to catch up.  The first of these was Stuart's excellent Love Letter - a very clever little game involving just 16 cards, some bluffing, some informed guesswork, and a fair bit of luck.  The winner is the first to win five rounds so there is inevitably some levelling as the person out front gets more attention from the other players.  So we all got to four points before James' lucky "Princess protected by a Handmaid" combo won him the last game.  Enormous fun and it plays quite quickly, so definitely one to bring out at the end of games evenings (I've already bought another copy!).

We followed up with the comfortable pair of old slippers that is Ra.  Always fun - James scored big early on with pharoahs and civilizations, Stuart scored late with a huge collection of buildings, Kieron had a more balanced strategy, but the final scores were James 48, Stuart 38 and Kieron 37.

Zulus - 1 May 2014

A Thursday night for a second go at the Zulu siege skirmish game with new appropriate scenery (2 mission station buildings, a dry stone cattle kraal and sandbag defences) and a reversal of sides - Deej and Kieron as the Brits and Andy and Stu as Zulus.

A plethora of Zulu cards coming up early resulted in large forces surrounding the mission station and managing to rush the defenders without the chance for them to fire many volleys.  Both buildings were overrun with the Redcoats managing to recapture the hospital once before having to fall back.  Mid-way through the game it looked like it was all up for the British but a run of Red cards allowed them to stabilise the position.  The relief column arrived reasonably quickly in the second run through the pack allowing the British to claim victory.

A good game but again quite an abrupt end.  Next time we'll try it with all 4 Aces having to come up in the second pack run through for a victory to be declared, allowing hopefully for more tension to build up.

The moment before the relief column arrived - the handful of survivors have pulled back to the inner courtyard as the Zulus charge in

Caylus Magna Carts - 9th April 2014

Only 3 rivals were around this week, so Kieron dug out a pared down version of the excellent Caylus. Both versions work best with 2 or 3 players to reduce the random factor and allow some element of planning.  This is the first blog entry for this game!
Andy spent the evening collecting gold and stone and managed to purchase the best civic building. Kieron ploughed most profits into the castle. Deej played the markets and built lots of his own buildings plus was able to get into the civic buildings right at the death to take the victory.
We must play this again soon.
Final reckoning Deej 52, Kieron 42 Andy 35

Beowulf & Ra - 2 April 2014

We had a second play of Beowulf - bought because although it's a film-tie, the game was designed by Reiner Knizia.  It's a three act abstract game with no real link to the saga but the artwork and playing pieces are quite nice.  At the end of Act II, it was pretty much neck and neck, but in Act III David played a particularly nasty tile on James, who retaliated with an even more powerful tile that enabled him to swap that nasty tile with a very good one next to several of David's playing pieces, reducing his final score by about a third in one swoop.  Not as fun as it sounds ;-)

We concluded that anyone with that tile could have swung the game in such a way to win it.  In other words, all the strategy and clever play in the rest of the game gets undermined by these two over-powerful tiles.  It is definitely a good game and one we'll replay, but we'll remove those tiles next time.  Final scores: James 235, Kieron 187, David 157.

This left us plenty of time to dust off Ra.  This never fails to please, with a bit of Derren-ing and a bravura performance by Kieron right at the end.  Although pulling out one more Ra tile would end it, Kieron successfully played Reiner Roulette and completely filled the tile track with points, jumping up into first place and winning the game with the last draw of a tile.  Final scores: Kieron 40, James 37, David 30.

Zulu Wars Skirmish Game - 19 March 2014

Adrian's excellent write-up and photos of this game are on his Rival Colonial Miniatures blog but I thought I'd add my photos here too.  A fun game with Adrian's lovely figures and edge-of-the-seat game mechanics.  Replay please!

Alea Iacta Est - 12 March 2014

Two very different games of "The Die Is Cast" - the first more steady as we built up provinces and collected patricians, the second felt more rapid as rounds ended quickly after sequences of six dice being placed in a single turn a couple of times.  Surprisingly though, the final scores in both games were almost identical.  The first game was James 42, Andy 39 (maximising on cornucopia again), David 37 and Kieron 32.  David won the second game with 43, followed by James on 41, Kieron 37 and Andy 33.

Confusedus, he say...

I just found a scrap of paper in the "games cupboard" dated 20 March 1996 (and yes, I've checked, it was a Wednesday).  It records a single quotation from Kieron:

It's funny, isn't it, how silence can be so much more powerful than not saying anything at all.

Appropriately, I can't think of anything to add to that ;-)

I also found a list of the games we owned at that time (it's a dot matrix print-out which must have come from my Commodore Amiga!) and an outline design of a game called Stick 'Em Up about conducting/foiling bank robberies.