The Castles of Burgundy - 30 July 2014

First play of Adrian's gift to James - The Castles of Burgundy.  The game is set in the Burgundy region of High Medieval France. Each player takes on the role of an aristocrat, originally controlling a small princedom. While playing they aim to build settlements and powerful castles, practice trade along the river, exploit silver mines, and use the knowledge of travelers.

The game is about players taking settlement tiles from the game board and placing them into their princedom which is represented by the player board. Every tile has a function that starts when the tile is placed in the princedom. The princedom itself consists of several regions, each of which demands its own type of settlement tile.

An ingenious game, really good fun, although James and Andy were well and truly outplayed by David and Adrian.  Final scores: David 222, Adrian 204, James 87, Andy 73.

The evening was also notable for the late night room invasion by a huge hornet.  It lost...

Darjeeling and Valley of the Kings - 24 July 2014

First play of James' new game from Kieron - Darjeeling.  As the name suggests, this game is about tea.  Not war, not empires, just picking tea.  It's a nice looking game with some neat pieces that fit into the master board depending on the number of players, and with some interesting mechanisms.

A whole set of tiles are set out on the table in the shape of India (or Sri Lanka or China).  Players control tea pickers who move around the country, picking tea where they land, with a new tea bush springing up in the location they vacate.  Players create shipments of tea by combining the tiles together in the right colour, getting bonuses based on the demand for that type of tea (using a clever 3D demand mechanism where the distance between two barrels in the bonus - easier seen than explained).

James got an early lead by shipping a very small shipment right away.  Stuart and David started to ship medium-sized shipments soon after, and David caught up and was neck-and-neck with James for most of the game, with Andy waiting to ship a couple of huge shipments.  This latter tactic may work better with fewer players but once Andy had shipped, everyone else did too, and the income from this shipment was unfortunately short-lived.

The game was a bit fiddly as you had to remember to score your shipping points at the beginning of your turn, and then take and replace tiles - as David noted, it would work brilliantly as an app with all the game housekeeping done for you.  But it was a light but clever game that played in an hour, so definitely one to play in an evening alongside another shorter game.

Final scores: James 99 (the game stops when a player reaches 100 but there are negative scores for unused tiles), David 92, Stuart 70, Andy 58.

Another new game next from David - a card game called Valley of the Kings.  This was expected to be the shorter game but with a lot of text to read on the cards and a lot of options to (over)think about, it actually took two hours, but I expect we'd play it quicker next time now we've familiar.

Like Dominion, the cards have multiple purposes - as artifacts (and so VPs when added to your tomb), as money (to buy more cards) or as actions, following the option written on them.  Each player has a deck of cards, initially of low value, which are enriched by purchasing new ones.  Stuart spotted first that thinning out the deck by discarding the original cards (preferably into others' decks) was a good tactic to ensure quality cards coming up more frequently in your hand.  We were all a bit late to start shifting cards (as artefacts) from our hands and into our tombs.  Stuart and David both started entombing sets of blue cards (the points are N squared, where N is the number of unique cards you have in a set) but with David to Stuart's left, he couldn't build up as a big a collection.

Another clever game we should play again soon before we forget how to play.  Final order: Stuart, David, James, Andy

St Petersburg - 16 July 2014

Andy writes:

Played St Petersburg Last Wednesday at Minchinhampton, only 3 Rivals attended.

 

St Petersburg is a very simple game and sometimes we can over think our strategy, James decided to go for the Buildings, David a very mixed and balanced approach,they both picked up the observatory card that most times can give you quite an edge, except if you're James, Anyway with quite a good deal of Luck. The scores at the end were:-

 

Andy 88

James 70

David 65

 

I really like this game, I think because you need to be lucky.

Tzolk'in - 3rd July 2014

Another Thursday games session brought the rivals to Kieron's for a cracking games of Tzolk'in. Every time we play something new happens. This time James and Kieron struggled all evening to gain enough food. Stuart went for a building strategy which was a slow burner but almost worked. Deej made it to the top of a god track.  There were plenty of "oh no" moments as well as some senior ones. Kieron hardly moaned at all, but just spent the evening quietly recycling skulls.
In the final reckoning, Deej's strength on all the god tracks as well as some clever chaining [ (c) Deej games systems 2003 ] proved to be the winner.
Deej 62, Kieron 58, James 43, Stuart 42
Sorry Stuart for not letting you win on your Rivals membership 10th anniversary games session!

Alea Iacta Est and Circus Flohcati - 25th June

We started the evening with a game of Alea Iacta Est. Lots of fun with the usual Derrening and helpful suggestions, combined with a couple of nya-ha-ha moments when a round was finished unexpectedly.

Final score was Adrian 49, James 43, David 36 and Kieron 33.

Burnt out by his victory, Adrian departed mumbling some excuse about early starts and important meeting tomorrow.

We then tried out Circus Flohcati (one of Reiner Knizia's two flea circus themed games), a game aimed at the whole family and one that plays extremely quickly. We ended up playing three hands and while it was fun, it didn't engage us as much as we'd hoped. Kieron ran away with the first two hands (luck or judgement???) but although James convincingly won the third it wasn't enough to catch up.

Final score: Kieron 171, James 162, David 140

Hanabi & Love Letter

A very relaxed evening playing a couple of card games.  The first was brought by Stuart and called Hanabi, currently quite popular on the BGG Family Game list.  This is a cooperative game with a unique mechanism - you hold your cards the other way around, so everyone else knows what you have, and tries to give you information during the game to enable the playing of a sequence of cards to set off one of five fireworks.  Really clever and led to some good-natured frustration when ESP failed.  I think we played it about three times in the end.

We finished with a very close game of Love Letter (using James' home-made Dad's Army set of cards).  I think we all got to three cubes each but Kieron got the fourth cube first, winning the game.

St Petersburg - 5 June

Three Rivals for anecdotes and St Petersburg at Adrian's.  A lovely game that Adrian and Kieron hadn't played for ages.  Asymmetric tactics commenced from the very first turn with Andy opting for a hand-expanding warehouse and a relentless collection of aristocrats; Kieron with multiple buildings; and Adrian balancing his options.  Come the final analysis Andy's tactics paid off big time, overtaking both others to win handsomely.  Kieron was second, Adrian last.  All the scores were above 100 but because we did a comparative calculation, just how awesome the scores were is, alas, lost to history.