Village & Alea Iacta Est - 28 August 2014

A small but select gathering for games this week.  We first played Village without the beer & inn expansion.  Andy majored on the market, James went travelling, and Kieron joined the council, enabling him to later produce lots of free goods to sell in the market to compete with Andy.  Final scores Kieron 68, James 53, Andy 42.

Then Alea Iacta Est which plays without the Temple/Fortuna elements with only three players.  A very close result with Andy on 47 and Kieron on 48, but James' useful set of Senate cards gave him the win with 59.

Trajan - 21 August

First 4-player go at Trajan, Adrian's Xmas present from Orhan.  After the success of Castles of Burgundy recently it was good to play another Stefan Feld game and this one was another winner.  Trajan is a reasonably complex Eurogame - in that there are a number of moving elements to keep in mind each turn, central to which is the 'mandala' concept, a rondel-type arrangement for determining the main action for each player each turn, but with the added element of extra actions being won by the positioning of coloured tokens around the rondel.  Very cunning.  Each round players opt to seek victory points by deploying meeples as legionaries in the provinces or builders in Rome, by shipping commodities, by seeking political office, or by acquiring power up tiles of various flavours.  The elements all fit together very harmoniously.  There is a fair bit of luck involved, but not so much that it detracts from the planning.  We all broadly adopted different strategies, with James specialising in shipping sets of goods, Andy dominating the military field, Kieron doing lots of building, and Adrian going for the political track.  In the end though being able to score points across the different disciplines seemed to be key.  Kieron's early lead was cut down to size to see the final scores being Adrian 119, Kieron 111, James 102 and Andy 58.  A good game.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/102680/trajan

Peloponnes & Darjeeling - 7 August 2014

A welcome return to old favourite Peloponnes.  We haven't played this for a while and had only previously played it with the maximum 5 (or 6 with the expansion).  With fewer players, the bidding is quite different.  Tiles are placed to match the number of players (3 in our case) and then made up to 5 by placing further tiles alongside a "Conquest Tile".  Players can bid on the 3 initial tiles in the same way, or can buy outright (with no risk of being displaced) any tile alongside the Conquest Tile at a cost of the value on the tile plus a further 3 coins.  This adds an interesting twist to the game.

Final scores (population/prestige) were James (39/35), David (36/29) and Andy (18/23) who had an unlucky start with an early earthquake taking out his first (expensive) building.

Plenty of time left for a second try of Darjeeling.  With David acting as scorer and James as tile placer for everybody, the game ran much more smoothly.  David and James pulled away from Andy early on, and then James inched ahead of David.  Still a strange game with the scoring at the beginning of each player's turn and it does feel hard to catch up with someone once they establish a lead.  But we think it will play even more balanced with 5 players.  Final scores were James 99, David 90ish, Andy 50ish.

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!