I Am The Harbour Master

Yes the above photo is the photographic evidence that I am truly the Harbour Master! But we will get to that part of the story later.
As I blogged yesterday the planned day of playing tabletops had to be rearranged for today. The plan was to be round Jamie's for around 10:30. I was hoping nah praying that the postman would arrive before I left with the First Contact data pack. I needed one card from this data pack for my planned Anarch deck to play against Jamie.
The courier arrived not long after 8am with one delivery consisting of King of New York and Perudo. As I was about to drive off with the car loaded up my Netrunner cards, Star Realms, Tiny Epic Kingdoms, and Age of War the postman walked past my car. In his hands were a couple of small Amazon packages. “By any chance are those two Amazon packages for number 4?” I enquired hopefully of the postman. The postman responded in the positive and handed over my deliveries. The postal gods had been kind to me and had delivered the data pack to me just in time. I had the card I needed (if I had identified the correct data pack it was in that is).

The full order was the Android:Netrunner First Contact data pack, Roll For It and a set of extra dice for Star Wars Imperial Assault.
In total Jamie and I played four games of Netrunner, and I didn't win a single one of them. The first two games I played as the heroic Anarch runner Noise fighting against the man. I did manage to steal some agendas, and the deck I came up with worked roughly how I thought it would. The first game I attacked Jamie's R&D a lot, and some of the remote servers. Second game I switched tactics, avoided R&D for runs. Jamie had put more ice in front of HQ and R&D leaving his Archives less guarded. I kept trashing R&D by installing viruses, did a run on Archives and installed a Hades Shard? That would allow me to access the whole of Archives at a time of my choosing irrespective of how much ice Jamie installed. I got two agendas out of this tactic when I pulled the trigger. So I was very pleased that this worked. The final two games I played as the corporate scum Weyland. I wasn't expecting much from this deck as it was made up on the spot. I do need to look more into what I want the corp deck to do, and I need to put my hate for the man to one side and get better at being the corp. but I do find playing the runner a lot easier. I'll put up the two decks I played in another post for ripping apart.
But even though I lost I had a blast playing. I'm just going to get better the more I play. I'm lucky Jamie is patient with me as we play. Sometimes I wasn't able to ask Jamie a question as it would of given away what I was going to do, so I had to quickly look up an answer in the rule book.
After Android:Netrunner we played Star Realms. It was just a single game that I was able to get multiple outposts out and allowed me to sit behind a Great Wall of bases and outposts, that stopped Jamie doing any serious damage to me. I was racking up authority, getting combos, it was really hard and I know from having been on the other end of this tactic just a little frustrating. What made it worse for Jamie was that none of the big hitters came out, or the base destroyers. That really did make the Jamie's job of getting through the Great Wall a lot harder. But he did well getting combos together to knock down the wall, but it would be back up next go, and fully built within a couple of turns. Still the inevitable with this strategy happened I won!
Sometimes I do think that maybe Star Realms might be a little bit biased towards a bases strategy.
After Star Realms we moved on to a game I've got but not played Takenoko. Cute hungry pandas, grumpy gardeners growing bamboo, and another game that I bought after seeing it on Tabletop. Now I'm not saying this because I won, but this is a fun game.
What turned out to be the penultimate game was Jamie and I learning to play Roll for It. It literally takes a minute to read the rules to learn to play. This was a fun little game to play. It's rolling dice, what isn't there to enjoy about doing that? What I like about this game is you have to manage your dice, it's possible to steal cards from other players by completing them first. It really is a great little filler game. Plus I won this game.
The last game we played was Harbour By Tasty Minstrel Games. When Jamie bought the game out it hadn't rung any bells. But once I saw market card and the player cards it clicked I had seen these before in a recent video YouTube. I think it was the Crits Happen Top 5 mini games or something like that. No wait it was a Watch It Played video.

Harbour is a worker placement game with a dynamic marketplace and a hint of set collection. The dynamic marketplace is a nice mechanic which basically means after a player buys a property the values you get for each of the four resource types changes. Which means you could just be about to buy a property based on the values currently on the marketplace, another player jumps in before you, buys a property and the values change, all of a sudden you can't get enough for your goods to buy a property. I love that. It's a touch of genius.

For most of the game Jamie had the lead and was always a property ahead of me, well he was the first to two buildings. Always buying a building a move before me. But I thought I was about to pull of a stunning win by buying two properties. I went to execute the coup de grace, but fell on my face, I had misread the building cards. I had misread the cards point value as the cards cost! I couldn't buy both buildings in one go. But I could buy one and in a couple of turns be able to buy the second. All the time I was expecting Jamie to movie to his building to buy his final building to win. But he didn't I was able to complete the two turns and buy the final required building. Even with a final turn Jamie wasn't able to buy a final building. It was time to add up our points. Just as a final act of dumbassery (is that even a word?) I miss read the cost for points and ended up with a score less than Jamie's! Once the points were correctly added up I had won. Now it was photo time. There is a card with the game that the game creators suggest you take a selfie with to allow you to boast about your victory. Hence the photo at the start of this blog post and the title of this post. They also suggest that if you tweet the picture to include them in the tweet. Which I have done as I shared with the world that I am THE HARBOUR MASTER!

I've had a totally awesome day playing games with Jamie. Thank you to Allie for being such an amazing hostess and the really delish chocolate brownie.

 

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