A monthly meet up the night before one of the most commercial and manufactured nights of the year, probably wasn’t going to get many people to attend. But that’s the advantage of hindsight.

Last weekend it was looking like it was just myself and The Usual Suspect that had committed to go. Honestly I didn’t fancy an evening gaming with him. Longtime sufferers of this blog know all about The Usual Suspect by now. It wouldn’t be an enjoyable time. So I cancelled the February meet up.

Then a couple of days before the cancelled date Gavin contacted me asking if the monthly meet up had been cancelled. Which I confirmed it had. In response I was asked if I was free that night and if I wanted to meet up and play some games. Naturally I was (I have no life after all). So we made arrangements to meet up.

Our first game of the evening was Blue Moon Legends. Neither of us had played the game before. It had only been in my collection less than 6 months, when a chance to buy a second hand copy, still sealed, at a bargain price came up on Facebook. It would have been rude not to snap the game up.

The thing I liked about this game before I had got it, and was a major attraction, everything you needed for the game was in the box. It came with 8 decks, and rules to construct and draft decks from that card pool.

Gavin and I played with the recommended starting decks for learning the game.

I loved the tug of war element for attracting the dragons. And how if you win a dragon and your opponent has more than one, you move one of them to the middle before you get to add one to your side.

The hand management is interesting, and really comes into it’s own when you get down to the last remaining cards of your deck. No cards in hand or your deck is an end condition. That looks at who has the most dragons. So you could use that to your advantage to prematurely end the game and grab the win.

The two games we played had a nice back and forth between the two decks. And it never felt that there was a run away winner, with no chance of coming back into the game.

Once you get used to the turn structure, the game flows nicely. And a nice touch is the summary of the main parts of a turn on the central game board. That game board is a nice alternative to a single big play mat or two play mats. It clearly marks where the deck goes, the discard pile, leaders, etc.

The plastic minis for the contested dragons are cool.

I just love that a friend and I who fancy playing a two player card game, can pick this up and play straight away. Everything we could ever need is in there. Pre-constructed decks – check, draft – check, deck construction – check. I know especially with the constructed side, and pre-constructed decks there is a finite replay ability. But it’s still a lot of game play. The only other game I have in my collection that is really as flexible as this, and in away is similar in idea, is Epic the Card Game.

Despite Gavin winning both games, I had fun playing this.

Next up it was time to take Gavin to the tea houses and play Hanamikoji. We played 5 games of this. But then it is a quick game. Apart from the first game that Gavin won, all the rest went to a second round. This presented Gavin with a mental block he struggled to overcome. For me in the second round words like attacking and defending start popping into my head. If Gavin currently has the gheisha’s favour I’m attacking it, if I have it I’m defending it. When defending I just need to make sure I match my opponent, because ownership doesn’t change on a tie, whilst trying to get the upper hand on the ones he controls. And that’s how I’m evaluating the situation.

We finished the evenings gaming with the recently delivered Kickstarter Kodama Duo (which is also just hitting the shops now too).

This is the 2 player version of Kodama (which could play 2 iirc). Basically they have tweaked the game to make it a better 2 player experience. But if you have Kodama, you can use this with that as well.

After a false start (we were scoring incorrectly) we started growing our trees, and attracting Kodama.

I like the I split, you chose mechanic for drafting your branches each round. That’s a nice improvement. Plus the person who only got one card gets a spirit token after scoring to replace a symbol on one of their branches.

Through out our play Gavin and I were fairly evenly matched on the score front. It was only the last scoring kodama that gave me the win.

I liked the original. This is just as nice as the original. It still looks beautiful on the table. Yeah a nice 2 player only version of the game.

So that was the second Wednesday. Some 2 player games, (which let’s face it often get left on the shelf on game nights, and need opportunities like this to play them) with a great friend. And hosted as usual by our excellent hosts The Luxe Cinema.