Salute - 6 April 2019

Andy and I travelled to Excel yesterday for another Salute.  A long journey but a good venue and so much to see.  Some of the highlights:

Cavemen hunting mammoths

Battle of Danholm 1807 (French vs Sweden)

The Williamite Wars in Ireland 1688-1691

A lunar battle in 10mm

Academics from University of Edinburgh wargaming attacking a crusader castle to understand more about how they were defended.

A fantasy/ancients game with fantastic scenery.

GORDON'S A-BRICK!  Flash Gordon in Lego!

And the highlight of the show for me... the Back To The Future trilogy in model form with two participation games: a hoverboard race for the second film and a Wild West shootout for the third film.  All three used the same location in different times and had an amazing light show controlled by an Arduino device which counted down the years, controlled the lightning in 1955, and set the Delorean tyre marks aflame in all three time periods.  Enjoy the video (includes a special bonus for David).

Clank! In! Space! - 3 April 2019

Another play of this fun new game.  Adrian made a swift dash for the treasures and ejected early in an escape pod with 81 points.  Andy wasn't far behind but collected a few more counters before his exit and won the game with 87 points.  David made it to the cargo bay with 57 points before succumbing and James, after acquiring a huge 97 points, had this reset to zero as he didn't even make it back to the cargo bay!

Clank! In! Space! - 20 March 2019

With no shortage of exclamation marks, this is one of the re-implementations of the excellent deck building and board game Clank!  We played the original dungeon escape version round at Stuart's recently.  This implementation has all the same mechanisms but with a brilliant sci-fi theme with lots of jokes and copyright-avoiding illustration and names on the adventurer cards.

James and Stu managed to exit using the escape pods but David and Andy succumbed before reaching the cargo bay, and didn't score the bonus 20 for escaping so we decided to record their acquired points anyway.  Final scores: James 97, Stuart 94, David 79, Andy 76.

Payroll raid - 24 January 2019

A belated write-up of the first quick game with the paddle steamer (now with added - but removable - bow wake and stern wash).

James' US Cavalry were escorting the quarterly payroll on the Louise Marie.

Andy's band of Mexicans launched two small boats to intercept the paddle steamer.

We modified shooting from a moving deck to another moving deck to make it a little harder, but still some shots hit home.

Andy's Mexicans started to board the paddle steamer and engage in hand-to-hand combat.  The fat Mexican leader failed about three times in a row to make the jump over the side.

Eventually, everyone was on the paddle steamer for an almighty scrap.

The US Cavalry lost their first Head for the Hills morale test and the surviving soldiers promptly jumped overboard and swam for the shore.

Leaving the fat Mexican to crack the safe and escape with the payroll.

Clank - 21st February 2019

We met on Thursday this week and Stu turned up determined to get us to play Clank!. Andy was initially unconvinced, but was eventually persuaded to give it a go.

Borrowing shamelessly from The Hobbit, Clank has us playing the roles of adventurers sneaking into a dragon's lair to steal treasure. The odd name comes from the need to keep quiet. Making noise introduces risk that you'll be attacked when the dragon awakes. This is done in a neat mechanism - every time you make a noise you pay a cube of your colour. When the dragon wakes these cubes are put into a bag and drawn out to seen who is hurt.

Once we got the hang of it the game played well, but the main thing was how much fun it was. Although there isn't much direct interaction, there is plenty of room to "advise" your fellow thieves about a course of action, to sneak ahead and claim artefacts before them, and of course the pleasure of watching their cubes come out of the dragon bag.

The mayhem of the game resulted in a lot of death. Final scores were James 63, Stu 63, David 50, Andy 43. James won on the tie-break.

It was so much fun that I bought Clank! In! Space! the next day and have already had a fun game with the family.

Dinosaur Island, Century: Spice Road - 16 February 2019

A flying visit by Kieron and family was a great excuse for some weekend gaming and a night out.  First up was Adrian's kickstarter game Dinosaur Island, which is essentially Jurassic Park without any royalties (I feel a trick was missed here - since it would have been one of the very few TV/movie tie-in games that is actually any good!).

It has a huge number of luridly-coloured playing pieces and setting it all up plus rules explanation took a while but the game itself is straightforward enough.  Harness DNA, create dinosaurs, entice visitors to your park, and make sure not too many of them are eaten.  Lots of fun.  I especially like the different dinosaur models.  Final scores: James 59, Kieron 51, David 43, Adrian 35, Andy 27.

We then played a three-hander of the very neat Century: Spice Road and finished with a couple of games of Red7.

Great to have Kieron back for some games - we miss you!

The Castles of Burgundy - 13 February 2019

A four player game of this good (if long) game.  Different tactics were employed which saw Stuart take a strong lead for much of the game, with David and James racing to catch him up and just getting ahead in the final scoring.  Scores on the doors: David 128, James 123, Stuart 117, Andy 70.