Wednesday saw the Fenland Gamers monthly meet-up for December. This was the last monthly meet-up of 2016.  Where has the year gone?

We split up into two groups. Jonathan went to another table with Debbie and Diego, to play Plague Inc. While Gavin, Katie and I played Alien Frontiers.

Gavin has been looking at purchasing Alien Frontiers, while I owned it, and had been looking for an excuse to get it to the table. So before the meet-up I’d suggested we played the game at the meet-up for him to try it first.

I did like this dice placement, area control game. 

At first you think how do I mitigate poor dice rolls? Then you look at the alien artifact cards and some of these allow you to adjust the value of the dice by one, or reroll them. Which means if you get those cards it becomes easier placing your dice for the action you want. 

There is a little take that in the game, such as being able to steal resources from other players, or moving colony domes from one territory to another. And these bits of take that come from either alien artifact cards or one of the orbital facilities.

The alien artifact cards are a nice touch. I particularly like the fact that the majority give you a choice of two options to decide between. 

Controlling a territory gives you a power up you can use whilst you control that territory. That control can be fluid. 

During our game I was using alien artifact cards to move the colony domes of the others to give me a majority, and take a majority away from them in another territory where I had no interest.

Scoring isn’t going to be massive. It’s a fluid thing that goes up and down depending on control of territories, some alien artifact cards. As the rule book describes it, the scoreboard is a snap shot of the current state of play. 

Katie and I drew on the points in our game, but I won on the tie breaker of having the most alien artifact cards.

It’s my understanding there is going to be a big box release of Alien Artifacts in 2017. If that is the case I’ll definitely be buying it so I can get the expansions. The expansions seem to be a bit elusive to get hold of at the moment.

So that last paragraph should tell you I really liked the game.

Our final game of the evening was Love Letter Premium edition. 

This is a beautifully put together edition of the game. The extra thick playing cards, the card sleeves, heart tokens, the awesome game box. This just oozes high quality.

This edition supports up to eight players using extra cards being shuffled in for player counts over four. 

One or two of the new cards I didn’t recognise the abilities of. So I’m assuming they are new or from the Archer edition. Other abilities on the new cards are from other editions like The Hobbit edition. And I did like these new abilities. 

Jonathan didn’t like the additional cards because they made guessing harder and keeping track a bit tougher. Plus I think the player count doesn’t really work at the higher numbers. I think the sweet spot is 3-4 players for Love Letter. 

If I use this edition again I’ll stick to the sweet spot. But maybe use some of the new cards to replace some of the older ones to shake things up a little.

Katie and Diego drew as winners. 

A great evenings gaming. Great company. Second Wednesday of each month. 

We have three meet-ups over the Christmas period. I’m looking forward to them. 

It seems that over the last two or three months that Fenland Gamers have become disciples of the ‘cult of the new’. More new games have been hitting the table than normal. This has been partially aided by some of the backed Kickstarters starting to deliver. I’m not complaining really, it’s nice to get these games to the table instead of them arriving and joining the ranks of the pile of shame.

Yesterday Jonathan called asking if I wanted to play his latest arrival Plague Inc. Like many at the tail end of last week and over the weekend, he had received his Kickstarter copy of the game, and now wanted to play it.

I was knackered, it had been a long day. I had been awake from about 4:30am that morning, and my initial plan for when I got home was sleep. But who am I to turn down a chance to play games?

Plague Inc apparently is based on a video game I haven’t played. I’m not sure if Jonathan has either. I think, and it’s always a risk making assumptions on behalf of someone else, he liked the idea of infecting the world, and killing it off. The polar opposite to most other games such as the Pandemic family. It’s competitive and not co-operative. Something that makes it different from Pandemic.

So what did I think of the game?

For those that are already thinking tl;dr, we both liked it.

So you have this player board that is double sided, but we didn’t play with the virus side of it. We played with the default infection side.

You have these slots on the player board that you use to evolve your infection with using trait cards (each trait card has a cost to install that you pay for with DNA points). Two of the slots have default abilities on, such as get one extra DNA point. So you have to weigh up just when you are going to cover up those default powers with a trait. There is some nice decision making going on here, especially when your slots are full. Do you install a trait that will allow you to go into hot countries? Which existing trait do you get rid of? Depending on the stage of the game, is it even worth spending the DNA points?

This is an area control game, where you are trying to control countries on the board so that you get DNA points at the start of your go. If a country gets totally infected, ie all it’s cities are occupied by an infection token, then the majority player at the end of their turn gets a chance to kill that country by rolling the Death Dice.

When you kill a country, you get more DNA points. You also get the card for the country (important for end game scoring, which also has a majority control element to it). Bit more importantly you get event cards. Event cards are so much fun. They add a take that element to the game. For instance, I was able to cancel one of Jonathan’s events by playing an event from my hand that allowed me to cancel an event played by another player. The event cards give you boosts to your DNA points, or allow you to move infection cubes from one country to another, they even allow you to block countries and regions. Plus there are other effects I’m sure that we didn’t get to see.

Placing country cards is a nice tactical thing. Can your opponent go into cold climates, and you can? Then you are going to place cold climate countries on the map. But do you trash that hot country card that you can’t go into, and get a new hand of trait cards instead? You can’t do both. Do you advance your opportunities to infect more places, or do you try and scupper your opponents opportunities? But they might have a trait card that they can play that allows them to go into cold climates.

This is very thematic, especially on the trait cards. They have such names as nose bleed or diarrhoea. Ok the point scoring and calling them DNA points, might be stretching it a little.

Yes I liked this area control game. It has some nice elements to it that make it interesting. There was no run away winner throughout the game amassing a huge point lead that couldn’t be caught up.

For the record books, I beat Jonathan.

And thanks to Jonathan you get another photo of me!