Peloponnes Card Game - 25 May 2016

First play of the card game version of one of our favourites, Peloponnes.  Unsurprisingly it has lots in common with the board game but with some interesting twists: resources aren't stockpiled, production is only used to construct buildings (with any excess going to luxury goods - the only track still remaining in the game); the cards double-up as money and resources.

One claim of the game is that not all the disasters will occur - but they did for us, one in the 2nd turn - and the card-disabling effects of these disasters was devastating.  At the end of the game David and Andy had more cards disabled than still available, with significant impact on their final population.  BGG Forum suggests starting each disaster counter one step earlier so that four of the same disaster cards have to appear to make it happen, rather than just three.  We will try this next time.

It also felt to us that the civilization tiles didn't feel very balanced with one seemingly providing a strong advantage and another making it very difficult to develop, but no-one has mentioned this on the forum, so we won't tweak this on the basis of just one game.

All in all, not as good as Peloponnes but certainly an interesting and playable alternative, with the advantage of portability.

Final scores: Stuart 21 Prestige/14 Population, James 10/8, Andy 9/5 and David 10/4.

Dead of Winter - 11 May 2016

With just two this week, a chance for the first play of David's game Dead of Winter.  Another zombies game, but unlike Kieron's favourite where you play just a single character, each player has a group of survivors to control.  The survivors have different strengths and abilities, and additional characters are discovered during the game - which gives you more dice / actions.

The board has a survivors hide-out which you can barricade as it is attacked by zombies, plus half a dozen locations where a stack of cards represents items you can search for e.g. medicine, food, additional survivors.

Each game has a mission card with victory conditions to achieve.  Our first game was to defeat a certain number of zombies within a certain number of turns (achieved).  The second was to completely search (i.e. take all the cards) from two different locations (also achieved... just).

The game is cooperative but with more players, each has a specific additional victory condition - so although you are still trying to meet the mission victory conditions and survive, there is still a way to have a bit of competition, but not in a full-blown Battlestar Galactica deceive-your-friends kind of way (so Andy will be content).

The rules were pretty straightforward but took a while to go through, suggest we just get cracking next time.  It certainly looked the part - printed pictures of the zombies and all the different characters, rather than coloured plastic like in Zombies.

It was a lot of fun - look forward to playing it with more players.

Notre Dame & Ra - 5 May 2016

A good night for Stuart with a double win.  Despite the name of the game, Stuart managed to win Notre Dame with 60 points without a single visit to the church, followed by James 53, Andy 50 and David on 43.

A much closer result with Ra and Stuart pipping David to 1st place by just one point.  Final scores Stuart 50, David 49, Andy 30 and James 26.  I still really enjoy this game although I've forgotten how to play it well - must try harder to rise out of the lower quartile!

Peloponnes - 27 April 2016

A full house for another fun game of Peloponnes.  A lot of high scores but the final round of disasters and population feeding hit a few of the civilizations hard.  Adrian won with a high and balanced score of population/prestige 33/35, followed by David 30/28, James 27/27, Stuart 20/36 and Andy 18/30.

Ra - 13 April 2016

The first of a series of games nights at Andy's over the coming weeks - with special guest gamer Keren, whose speciality was making bids that inadvertently (but entertainingly) had the most devastating impact on David's game (the table overflowed with sympathy....).

Andy was much more alert than we hoped and built his usual extensive collection of buildings, accumulating a huge score in the final round but the winner was James with hardly any buildings but a steady collection of points in each of the three rounds.  The final reckoning of bidding counters saw Andy slipping to third place after giving five points to Keren.  Final scores: James 48, Keren 41, Andy 39 and David 34.

Lancaster - 3 February 2016

Four player Lancaster for a little Plantagenet fun on a Wednesday.  As per usual the difficulty of optimising all elements of the game (knight placement, battles, the laws, and collection of nobles) made for a damn close run thing.  Final scores: Adrian 51; James 49; David 45; Stu 41.

St Petersburg - 10th February 2016

We took a trip over to Andy's this week, and quickly settled down for a game of St Petersburg. During set-up we took the decision to remove the Observatories from play. Our previous experience (including James' victory romp two weeks ago) is that if the Observatory comes out early the person who obtains it has a massive advantage. This did mean that the building pile was two cards light, but we decided to give it a go.

Compared to last time, the game was a lot tighter, with everyone but Stu trying to keep pace on aristocrats while looking to take an advantage elsewhere. Andy built up a large income in workers, but was lacking in victory points. David failed to build his worker supply, but managed to generate reasonable income from the other phases to compensate.

For much of the game Stu and David were neck and neck, but David managed to pull ahead at the end.

Final score was David 93, Stu 75, Adrian 71 and Andy 68.

I think the game played better without the Observatory. Something else we could try is to put them into the second half of the deck.