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.

Tzolk'in 24th Feb 2014

We introduced Stu to this intriguing worker placement game and he wiped the floor with us.
Kieron and Andy went for the skull placement tactic. James went out to build temples and Stu went for technology upgrades with the Special temple earning him 33 points.
Kieron actually spent most of the evening begging for money and not feeding his workers. James built a load of buildings but for little reward, although he did gain almost all of his points from temples. Andy picked up the skull temple from under Kieron's nose after a double turn on the cogs of doom  left Kieron bereft of skulls. Meanwhile Stu having moved quickly to the top level on the building technology, was amassing close to 10 buildings as well as the temple which rewarded his technologies.
Final positions were Stu on around 70, Andy on 50+, James and Kieron in the 40's. At the end we forgot to go to market which would have affected points a little, but Stu was out of site!

Amun Re - 19th February 2014

We tried Amun Re with 3. It's a great little game, but I think it plays better with 4 or 5. Andy had a bit of a brain-melt with the scoring system, and didn't bother with building pyramids in the first half of the game. I acquired a load of scoring bonus chits in the first half of the game and was very lucky to make a number of them stick at the end of the game.

David 52, James 40, Andy 20