Category Archives: Fenland Gamers

Fenland Gamers

Infecting the world

Fenland Gamers, game night

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!

Meaty Game Saturday

Fenland Gamers, Game day

If I can (and I’ve said this before) I like to arrive early and set up. So that once the other players (Jeff and Diego in the case of yesterday afternoon)  arrive we can start playing straight away. 

Yesterday we were playing in the function room due to a third birthday party taking over our regular spot. I don’t envy those parents having to entertain kids that age.

So safely out the way we randomly selected our player boards and faction boards for Scythe.


This was Jeffs and mine third game of Scythe, Diegos first. But our first three player game.

An hour and a half or so is all it took for Diego to win. Which is nothing for a game like this. Plus the time just flies by.

But Jeff and I still really like Scythe. And now Diego has joined the fan club. 

Our second game was Cry Havoc.


We were still referring to the rule book for our second game of this. But this was a far better experience than the first game. 

With a couple of rules now played correctly, the aid of the faction tactics advice printed off the Portal site, this felt a lot better. It seemed we were using our factions to their abilities better. 

But despite this Jeff and I still lost to Diego. 

It’s so nice to get these meatier games to the table. And I’m fortunate that I have such great folks to play these games with, and a place we can play them.

A great afternoon gaming. Despite not winning for the majority of the games I felt I was in with a shot of winning. In fact it was only in the last round and a third in Cry Havoc that Jeff took me out of the running I think.

Can’t wait until Wednesday now for our monthly meet up and Rogue One.

Pandemic Iberia 

Fenland Gamers, game night

Pandemic Iberia hardly had time to be unpacked before it was hitting the table.

Jonathan, Diego and myself met up last night, just 24 hours after the game had arrived, to try and stop the spread of various diseases across Spain.

Firstly Pandemic Iberia is a lovely looking game. I really do like the design of the board, the graphic design of the cards, the tokens. It’s just beautiful. It really has that historical, Spanish feel.  It’s easily one of the best looking games of the year.

Our game last night was just a basic setup, 4 epidemic cards (or I thought there were 4, more on that later). Our logic was it’s a learning game, and we knew there were new mechanics in the game. Ok it’s Pandemic, we had a good base knowledge to work from. And having played it, we could easily have raised the difficulty level, despite the new stuff.

In the basic game of Pandemic Iberia the majority of the setup is just the same as standard Pandemic. However they do spice it up with mixing event cards into the player deck. Which seems to be the first of the ideas that have come across from Pandemic Legacy. But that isn’t even the biggest impact. Instead of everyone starting in the same city of Atlanta or the Spanish equivalent, each player gets to choose their starting city from one of the starting player cards in their hand.  Which is fantastic I really liked that.

The next idea taken from Legacy is the idea of the quarantine token. But in Iberia its called purified water, and instead of just protecting a single city, it protects the cities in an area. A nice touch.

Rail tracks are a new idea for this game, and boy do they impact it hugely. Once you have laid down some track movement between cities on the track laid becomes a single move action. So the ability to get around the board becomes very very fast indeed after a few turns.

The ports marked by an anchor also allow fast movement around the map as long as you have a card in your hand matching the colour of the port you want to go to. So with the right cards and well planned train tracks you can get around Spain very very fast indeed to take on those outbreaks.

Ok I like these touches, but they did seem to make the game easier. Would I be saying that if we had played with four or more epidemic cards? Maybe.

We were playing with three epidemic cards. When I was counting the cards out to place into the player deck, I only had five. So I assumed that I had already got one in the player deck. An assumption that was to prove wrong. At the end of the game there were only three epidemic cards in the players deck. No missing card in there. My copy of Iberia had only come with five epidemic cards not the full six. Thanks to the awesome graphic design, I can’t take one of the epidemic cards from my played copy of Legacy and use that instead.

So I do have a call raised with Z-Man for the missing epidemic card, plus a replacement red microscope token.

It is very cool that the game comes out of the box with two expansions! We definitely want to play with the patient flow rules, which sees the cubes migrate towards hospitals to get cured! Plus the historical illnesses looks interesting as well. So I like that there are options to vary the game a little, which adds to the replayability.

Graphically, and production wise I think this is miles better than ‘classic’ Pandemic.

This is a great addition to the Pandemic family, and possible gone straight to the top as my favourite version of the game.

If Z-Man hold true to their word, if you haven’t got this game already, and you want it, then be prepared to pay the eBay silly money that people will no doubt be wanting for this. Why? Z-Man said Pandemic Iberia will not be reprinted. This “limited” run was it. If you see a copy for the rrp then snap it up.

 

Sinning in Wisbech!

Fenland Gamers, Game day

I think I read or saw something like the following online in the previous year or so since CMoN started The Others Kickstarter, “The Others is Eric Lang’s Zombicide, if he created Zombicide”. I think I’ve paraphrased that correctly.

We all know how I feel about CMoN, and the saga that was this Kickstarter project for The Others. It involved lies and deceit, failures to communicate, and if you looked up in a dictionary the phrase “couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery”, you’d see pictures of CMoN staff.

So having gone all out on The Others (only thing I didn’t get was the artbook and prints) I was definitely going to be getting this to the table. The videos for The Others on the interweb are of varying quality. One or two that are reviewing the game, and going over the rules as part of the now cliched format, have mistakes. Mistakes that I found annoying and made the videos unwatchable for me. A bit like Suzanne on The Dice Tower mispronouncing names. It grates and just eats away at me every time they make the mistake.

Yesterday Jeff, Diego and myself met up at The White Lion to play The Others. We were using just the base game, along with the plastic tokens (instead of the cardboard ones), extra tentacle and heart counters, and lots of extra dice from all the expansions.

For this first play we followed the suggestion of the rule book of playing the Terror story Havan’s Last Stand. Out of the two layout options for the story we would be playing I chose the one that looked the easiest for the players to get around on. I was playing the sin. So I chose Pride, just because he looks so fricken cool. Probably the best looking model in the whole game, and that’s including the expansions

. Although Apocalypse comes pretty damn close. The acolytes chosen to help Pride and his minions in their quest to kill the men of FAITH, were the corrupted nuns.

I was disappointed that I only got one member of the Hell Club Flay out on the map.

So let’s look at what I liked about the game.

I did like the one versus many aspect of the game. It was fun playing as the sin. It works very well in this game. Having turn tokens that you flip when you take a turn works really well keeping track of when you take a turn, for both sides. This allows some flexibility in the order players take their turns, and more importantly the turn structure. It’s not a you take your turn, now I take my turn, then you take your turn etc etc. But more a you take your turn, do I want to react to what you have just done? structure. The sin player gets a turn counter for each player on the hero side. Whilst each player gets two turn counters. There are ways to get extra turns but we don’t need to know that here. So the sin player really does have to decide when they will respond to what a player is doing. Once they have used their turn tokens and the players still have tokens left, you are left there just watching the action unable to do anything about it.

Well that’s not entirely true. The sin player also has their own mini deck of cards. At the start of the game the sin player draws a starting hand of five. The sin player can play one of the cards from their hand per turn. So that’s on their own turn or a player’s turn. These cards are never nice for the heroes. At the end of the round the sin player gets to draw new cards (if they are able to).

And I like that, the tough choice of having to decide when to respond, and when/if to play a card.

I’d like to describe The Others as a streamlines Zombicide. And in some ways it is. Like the things a player/sin can do on their go. It’s move and take an action (fight or cleanse a space of sin tokens), possible use a city space to gain some cool benefit. Movement from a building is simple, no having to spend an action opening doors.

The map tiles are smaller than Zombicide, but similar in layout.

The corruption and wounds on the player boards is a brilliant mechanic. Being able to take corruption to gain an instant benefit when making a dice roll. But there is a nice push your luck element here. Being able to decide which corruption benefits you lose when placing wounds. It’s really nice.

Ranged combat, works nice. And I like that if any enemies that are still standing after the ranged attack try and move towards the attacker and return the favour.

While playing I did feel that during the early part of the game that the heroes had the upper hand. But as the game went on that slowly changed, with the sin player getting the advantage. Especially when the sin comes out on the board.

In one of the final fights I was rolling the combined dice for the sin, a controller, abomination, two acolytes. Which I think was like seventeen dice! Plus on top of that there was some extra dice from the re-roll mechanic. Naturally I totally destroyed the hero in that fight.

Yes there can be some luck in the dice rolling. But having a face that allows you to get an extra dice to roll, and on the hero side also set that face to whatever you want, is nice. But I don’t think that there is much you can do to mitigate bad dice rolling. But there are plenty of ways to boost the number of dice you are rolling, from having other players in the same space as yourself, equipment bonuses, taking corruption. On the sin side, making sure you have other monsters and pentagram tokens in the same space. There is a nice flow to the combat.

Having the stories with their paths and different objectives is nice, as is having a couple of options for the map layout. It’s nice giving the players a sense of control over the path that they take. It’s also nice that the stories are grouped into terror, corruption and redemption. Which focus on different things, like Terror stories are all about combat, while corruption ones are about the struggle with corruption, and redemption is about saving the city.

As a sin player I liked the apocalypse track, and the drawing from the  apocalypse deck. This helps redress the balance from the players having the advantage in the early stages to giving the advantage to the sin player in the later stages.

In our game Pride won, but it was getting close. The players only had Pride to kill to complete the final mission.

This was fun, and I did enjoy playing the sin. Jeff and Diego had fun playing the heroes. Next time we play I think I will bring everything along, and have the team building, choose a different type of story maybe. Even have someone else play the sin so I can try playing the heroes.

God I hate you CMoN. I love this game, but I feel so dirty now for wanting to play it again, and liking it so much.

Having played this one v many game, I’m very keen now to play the campaign of Imperial Assault.

The Streak Ends!

Fenland Gamers, formula d, game night

Last night saw the second race of our Formula D league season two. The circuit for this race was Singapore.

As per our house rules our starting grid was the reverse order of the finishing positions of the previous race. Which meant Katie the reigning champ and winner of the first race of season two was starting at the back of the grid. Jonathan was in position four, Debbie three, myself in second and Diego was pole position.

I stalled on the starting grid, which Jonathan thought was funny. well until he did exactly the same thing!

Somewhere in the first half of the first lap, Katie manages to move up through the pack into pole position. We don’t know how, but it happens. It has been a mystery to us. Diego wasn’t going to let his lead go that easily, and he managed to hold on to it for at least three quarters of the first lap.

Unusually for me I was taking very little damage on my way round the track. While Katie and Diego were vying for first place, Jonathan and I were trading blows over third. Debbie was happily bringing up the rare, sometimes getting within striking distance of making a move for fourth.

Katie had the lead by the end of the first lap, but she needed a pitstop. Diego was second, and made the call he didn’t need to stop. Jonathan was third, and also in pretty bad shape that he needed to do a pitstop. The pitstops gave Diego and myself the opportunity to gain ground and challenge for the top spot.

We weren’t entirely sure that we had the advance pitstop rules interrupted correctly. They seemed to be a bit confusing. So we will have to go on to bgg and investigate.

In the meantime, lap two was continuing like the first, but tighter.

Diego and Katie were battling for first place. With the advantage clearly with Diego. While Jonathan and I continued our dueling for third.

Somehow I was driving exceedingly well. I was rarely overshooting, my gear selection was working for me. I was making ground on Katie in second! That was helped by her and Diego both skidding on this lap. They had both overshot too many times. As had Jonathan, which meant that I was in remarkable good shape for the second lap, and no pitstop.

In the second third of the track I overtook Katie! I wasn’t going to catch Diego up who was closing in on the finish line. The gap between me and Katie grew. She was having to be extra cautious, overshooting for her could mean instant elimination.

Diego had done what we had thought impossible. He had beaten Katie and taken the win. I crossed the finish line in second. I too had beaten Katie!! This was unheard of in the short history of the league. Katie had suffered her first defeat, and fallen to third place. Jonathan crossed in fourth with Debbie limping over in last place. Katie’s winning streak had come to an abrupt end.

Despite there being a new race winner. Katie is still top of the points table. In the third and final race of the league in the new year Katie will be starting in the middle of the pack. But the pressure will be on for her to reclaim her title, and start a new streak. Will that pressure be too much?

Mechs and beverages

Fenland Gamers, Game day

My game of the month for November is going to be so hard to choose. Contenders so far, T.I.M.E. Stories, Kemet, Cry Havoc, and the subject of today’s post and Saturdays gaming session, Scythe.

Saturday saw me playing Scythe with Jeff. I’d had a small piece of luck that morning when the metal coins for the game turned up in the post.


Wow! What an amazing game. Boy does it live up to the hype.

First off the game is beautiful. The art is amazing, and I have to admit I’m so tempted to try and get the art book now. The quality of everything else with the game is also really good. There is a lot of attention paid to details, such as little cut outs on player boards to keep cubes etc in place, and to show where they go.

You get two little containers for the wooden tokens. Now I prefer the wooden tokens to the realistic ones you can buy. Plus the board is doubled sided, with the second side being a larger board. So less crowded, but needs the board expansion too to use.

I love the alternate history 1920’s theme, and the art, minis etc really bring this out.

This is not a small game. You will need a large table to play on. Luckily our venue The White Lion has an amazing, easily 12 foot wooden table we are able to play on. Which easily accommodates a game the size of Scythe.

You’d think looking at the game that it was complicated and hard to learn. But oh no, this is very easy to learn and pick up. Plus between Watch It Played and Jamey Stegmaier’s YouTube videos you can be playing this without touching the rule book. But the rule book is pretty good, I found it clear and easy to follow. Unlike a couple of recently played games where we found the rule book lacking. 

There are some nice little player aid cards that summarise turns, mech river crossing powers, even suggest for new players things to try on their first few turns. Plus there is a large player aid sheet too! Yeah I like this player support.

Surprisingly the game is rather quick to set up. The previously mentioned player boards with the cut outs definitely aid in this as does having information on individual player setups on the player and faction boards.

Having asynchronous player abilities, means there is a lot of replayability. Plus the unique abilities don’t seem over powered. 

The taking an action and not being able to take the same one twice in a row (unless you have the character I was playing). Along with each action having two parts that you may or may not do, it’s up to you. It’s a really neat mechanism that gets you thinking about action order.

The upgrade mechanic is really nice. You take one cube from the top row on the player board and place it in an allowed spot in the bottom row. This has the effect of making that ability where the cube was from more rewarding when taken. And the bottom option where it was placed cheaper to take next time. 


I like the enlist mechanics also a nice touch. You get a maximum of four of these recruits, each one when recruited gives an instant bonus, (you chose from the four available on your faction board, once taken it’s gone) plus then an on going bonus when ever a person on your right or left uses that ability. So it becomes important that you keep an eye on what other players are doing each turn.

I really like the factory mechanic. Get to the factory space and you are able to choose a factory card that gives you an extra action you can chose to take on your turn. You are only allowed one of these. So getting to the factory space first gives you the pick of the litter, and not having to choose scraps. However in our second game I wanted all three. It was really hard choosing just one.

When you do an event with your character it’s a joy. You get to first draw an event card and see a painting of beauty. Then you have to choose one of the three options (unless you have an ability that allows you to chose two like Jeffs faction did). The options tell a little story based on the scene depicted in the painting, and give a reward that might have a cost to it. A lot of time must have been spent crafting these little descriptions because they convey so much of the theme along with the painting. Genius.

Battles are rather cool. They are not the forgone conclusion you think they’d be. A combination of spending up to a maximum of 7 points (depending how many you have) and combat cards to boost the final score. With the highest final score winning. Very streamlined, very quick and easy.

Objectives add more replayability to the game. You get two at the start and can only complete one of them. These are random each game. In our second game I didn’t even attempt to complete mine.

It’s possible to end the game and still lose. Which is what happened in our second game. I was really going for it, completing stuff as quick as possible to get my stars out. My final two stars to get out and end the game were battles that I had to win. But at that point I had enough battle cards and points to get those victories. 

But Jeff had better popularity than me, which along with having got buildings out in end game scoring positions, gave him just enough points to get the win.

Even losing both games I had a blast. The time flew by, it never felt like we had been playing for 3.5 hours or so. 

This is an amazing game. Can’t wait to play it again. I do regret not backing this on Kickstarter. But I do have a Kickstarter special edition which is basically the basic game plus promos. To which I’ve pimped it out with the metal coins as you know. But I have the board extension on pre-order along with the expansion and new $50 metal coins that the expansion introduces. 

Just go buy this you won’t regret it.

Butt kicking

Fenland Gamers, game night

“Life, don’t talk to me about life.” Marvin the paranoid robot, HHGTTG

It seems this last week has seen life outside of board gaming come crashing in on the little bubble of alternate reality we call gaming.

For one reason or another game sessions have been cancelled (and rescheduled at a future point in the space time continuum) or gone ahead with different games hitting the table.

Last night was one of the latter.

Gavin and I met up at The White Lion to play some two player games instead of our intended game, because life indeed had thrown a curve ball or two at two of our gaming companions.


Our first game of the evening The Manhattan Project Chain Reaction. Gavin hadn’t played this before and had wanted to try it. Looking at my stats apparently I’ve played twelve games of Chain Reaction. With a 50% win rate, and an average score of 9.83 points. For a two player game of this I have the current high score of 13 points, and also the highest losing score of 10.5. And after last night I also have the honour of the highest losing score as well!

I did trigger the end of the game by scoring 10 points last night, with Gavin sitting on 9 points and two uranium. So it would have been a draw (uranium in the end scoring are worth half a point each), unless he was able to score another bomb or as I pointed out more importantly score a load bomb card for 2 points. Which Gavin was able to do with his last five cards of the game. Nabbing him the win with 12 points, to my new highest losing total of 10 points.

Gavin liked the Chain Reaction, he was already a fan of the big brother board game. I did advise Gavin to try and find a copy of the deluxe game before committing to buying the regular version. But that may be a mission impossible. I watch two very active UK based trading and selling pages for board games on Facebook. I’ve got some bargains off them. However since Chain Reaction was sent out to Kickstarter backers, and also the regular version hitting the shops, I don’t think I have once seen a copy up for trade or sale. Thats pretty unusual, and I think a testament to how good the game is. Unless hardly anyone in the UK backed the project that is.

For our next game we played a new game for me, Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small. A lighter two player version of the bigger Agricola. Well Gavin hadn’t actually played the physical version before, but had been playing the app version a lot. After playing this I may have to get the app, the physical version is I gather from Gavin “between printings”, and rather elusive to get hold of.

I did enjoy playing this version a lot. Despite once more losing. I think that this is something I could play with Nath. It would most definitely fit on the very small table he has in his room at halls.

This for me was a much better game than the full game. But that could just be down to poor experience I had when being taught it. But that previous knowledge did give me something to work with here.

Ok I think I have just talked myself into trying to get the physical version of this.

Our final game of the evening was 7 Wonders Duel with the new Pantheon expansion.

Wow! I like what this expansion brings to the game. The new decisions it adds, the new tactics, wow. I’ll look a bit more in depth at this expansion in another post (if I remember).

I thought due to my inability to count won the game on the very last card of the third age with a science victory. But I had miscount my science cards, I was short by one symbol to get the win. Doh!

What we did have was an incredibly close game in the end. I thought Gavin had run away with the victory. He thought I had!

But once the dust had settled after all the points had been collected and totalled up, Gavin had won by a single point. 71 points to 70.

Yep I hadn’t won a single game the whole evening, but still I had had a blast.

For my gaming buddies who are dealing with the harshness of the sticks and stones that life throws at you, I’m sure I speak for everyone you play games with, our thoughts and prayers are with you and hope you can make it back to the table soon.

We’ll keep your seat warm for you, although we can’t guarantee we won’t look at your cards or take your go for you.

This area is mine

Fenland Gamers, Game day

Yesterday Jeff, Debbie and I got together to play some games!

Kemet was going to be one of those games, but it wasn’t guaranteed that Cry Havoc would make it in time. I knew it was in the postal system making its way to me, and it was due to arrive.

Luckily it arrived an hour before we were due to meet up and play some games. So as I was popping cardboard chits, I had the Watched It Play video on for the rules. 

We started our gaming off by playing Kemet.

I liked Kemet.

I started off with red and blue pyramids, with my red pyramid on level 2. I was going full on aggression with a hint of defence. 

Within two actions I had the red snake god/monster supporting my one of my troops. By the end of the turn I had also got the Delta temple, while Jeff had grabbed a temple, and Debbie had the Sanctuary of All Gods. 

I got the scarab beatle as my other god/monster, grabbed a second temple, and was allowed to keep the two temples unchallenged for about three days! I bought a tile that allowed me to have a troop size of seven instead of five.

Jeff did steal my level 4 red pyramid, that slowed me down a little as I tried unsuccessfully to get it back, and ended up recruiting seven units, and placing the scarab beetle on that space to win it back.

I liked the combat, the choosing a card to play and one to discard mechanism is hard. You don’t want to throw any of the cards away. But you have to make that decision. Then you have to decide if you are going to boost the attack with a divine intervention card or two. Assuming that is you have any you could play. 

I like the aggressive nature of the game. You can’t hide, the clock is ticking from the moment the game starts. 

I like that initial decision of what your starting pyramids will be, it determines the style of playing/tactic you will be using for the rest of the game. 

The pyramids level determining what level of power tile you can get is a great idea. And a nice way to slow down the arms race. Otherwise everyone would just jump in and buy uber powerful cards at the start. 

Having the three coloured power tiles focusing on the three tactical paths is nice. Naturally I was going for aggressive red tiles, and the odd blue defensive tile.

I like that taking a temple is like saying “come on if you think you’re hard enough!” As is taking a pyramid up to the max level of four. Naturally Jeff in our game did in deed think that about my red pyramid!

Yeah I’ll be playing this again.

Right next up, Cry Havoc.

Yes another aggressive area control game!! This one is one of the hottest games at the moment.

I have to admit when Portal Games announced this game nearly a year ago, it didn’t grab me. In fact I thought “nah” not interested. 

But then I saw the Watched It Played video of Rodney playing against his son “Lucky” Luke. “Wow that looks amazing and fun” I thought. The combat mechanism looked interesting and full of interesting decisions, along with being unique.

In our play of the game there were a couple of misplays. We missed how you got terrain cards into your hand. We thought you could only draw from your own draw deck with the draw card action. And we were puzzled how you got those cards into your deck. 

Then it wasn’t entirely clear what happened with scoring of prisoners, victories for the person taking on the role of the trogs in a battle. And I still need to clear that up by looking on the bgg forums.

We were no way playing to the strengths of our factions. But that comes with experience.

This didn’t seem as aggressive as Kemet. There wasn’t as much player vs player battles, but more taking on the local trogs. The player vs player happened more towards the last couple of rounds.

Jeff did run away with the points, and cut out a round. So instead of five rounds we had four. 

The asynchronous factions is nice. But you really need workout what your faction is good at before the game starts, and play to its strengths.

The manual could be clearer on the trogs in battle in a two/three player game. 

Being able to take prisoners is awesome. Then getting victory points for them before the owning faction gets a chance to buy them back. Genius. It’s like hostage taking and holding them for ransom. 

Multi use cards. What else can I say. It’s a mechanic I like. 

I like this, some nice decisions to make, a nice game that invites you to play again just to master the faction you are playing.

A nice “aggressive” afternoon of gaming. Saturdays should be spent like this. 

Men and Women of UNCLE

FEG@WL, Fenland Gamers, game night, Uncategorized

Can you guess what last night was?

Yep it was FEG@WL or the long winded version Friday Evening Gaming At The White Lion! Our weekly gaming meet up at the Fenland Gamers.

Our gaming session now clashes with Steak night at The White Lion. So sadly that lovely big table we played on is now unavailable. But as usual The White Lion has generously allowed us to use their function room.


I think you will agree there is a little room for growth in numbers. 

We are very grateful to The White Lion for allowing us to use the facilities they have for free. It allows us to continue to run the weekly session as free to attend events. Which is part of the clubs DNA. Both Jonathan and I both really believe that you shouldn’t have to pay to play games, “free at the point of play” as Jonathan likes to say (I think that’s his words more or less). It’s an expensive enough hobby as it is buying the games.

There are other reasons as to why we don’t like to charge but you don’t want to waste valuable time hearing a diatribe from me on gaming clubs.

Our hosts provide us with great facilities, great beverages, it has free parking, and now great food if we want it.

Oh yes I had to sample the bannoffee pie they had on the menu. It was really good. The rest of the menu looked very tempting too, Debbie the manager showed us photos of the dishes. The only draw back is I’d just want like the ribs, plus the special plater and the wings. I’d be in a meat coma in no time! 

But word of warning to club members we will be arranging some sort of food thing after a session real soon. 

Right on to the real reason you are here… your bored with life, have nothing better to do and want to read my poorly put together thoughts on games.

We played one game last night and that was a learning game of the recently arrived Covert. A game I had bought second hand at a really good price off one of the Facebook boardgame trading groups.

I should point out, and I don’t think when people read that we played a learning game, it is exactly that. We haven’t even read the rules, or at best managed to skim read them before hand. Yes not ideal, and for some this is a major sin. But we have busy lives, and sometimes it is easier this way!

So after setting up, going through the rules we started playing Covert.

I think the theme comes across really well in this game, from the components, graphic design, and the mechanics. They just combined well to bring out the theme.

You have elements of hidden information where players are keeping their code cards, missions, operation tokens and ‘activity’ cards (can’t remember the exact name). Then you have open information,such as your dice, character, completed missions and code cards.

And this works really well especially the dice. The first phase of a ’round’ starts with everyone rolling their dice, and taking it in turns to allocate them to actions. Knowing the other players dice allows you to potentially block another player on an action. 

You also during this phase get the chance to grab first player advantage but doing so means you will have to forgo at least one action to do so. 

But being first means you get first attempt at code breaking, which is the next phase. And you may really need to be first to make sure you decode your card and get that bit of equipment you badly need. “Oh no”, did they just play an operation token to steal first player spot for code breaking? !!! 

Or it might be you really need to be first taking actions in the third phase so you get that mission card you really wanted.

The operation tokens were cool. And provided one way to mitigate poor dice rolls, or other cool effects like moving agents three spaces. But it costs you a dice in the allocation phase to get one, and they are random.

If I’d drawn the right one in the last round of our game Jonathan may not have won! 

Those ‘activity’ cards. Love them, multiple use. Act as equipment, can be used to fly an agent to the city named. Or finally can be used for its ability. The abilities are the same as the operation tokens as far as I can tell. So another way to mitigate poor dice rolls, and other cool powers. 

Completing missions possibly depending on the mission gives you not only points but a permanent resource that can be used to complete other missions. 

There is a lot to like about this game. It’s not super heavy. But it’s fun. At one point Debbie thought our game was never going to finish. But Jonathan and I both completed the majority of our missions in the last three rounds, we both had rounds where we completed two or three missions in a round.

It was a quick game to pick up, although Debbie didn’t grok it until near the end. We had the majority of the game down easily by end of turn two. Then it was just clarifying the odd point or symbol.

A great fun game, Jonathan was James Bond in the end for the record.

So that was our only game for the evening. 

Great company, great beverages and food, and a great game. What more do you need to end the week, and start the weekend?

The ugly child

Fenland Gamers, game night

Looks can deceiving. There is that old adage “don’t judge a book by its cover”. 

And for Monday nights learning game there were never truer words said.

We were learning to play Castles of Burgundy. This game is not going to win any beauty pageant. But as the tired mantra of ugly people everywhere suggests, what this game lacks in looks it more than makes up for in personality!

Castles of Ron Burgandy – I know that was a poor joke. But it had to be done. Is a very nice game. You are rolling dice, getting tiles, adding them to your tableau, getting some benefit. All fun stuff.

Let’s get straight to the bad points, you may have guessed by the introduction it isn’t a pretty game. But who cares? The game play is great.

The rule book is not great and often the cause of some discussion and misplays.

And that’s all I can say that’s negative about the game! 

We were playing with the basic player boards, well it was our first game. So everyone had the same map. But the bit I like and we didn’t play with them was that there are more player boards each with different layouts/maps on them. 

This kind of makes it asynchronous for the players, each having different agendas on the tiles you need to get to complete your zones on your map. 

It also means lots of replay ability. Which means the game will be fresh for a long time.

Yes you are rolling dice, but the game has mechanics that allow you to manipulate the dice to get the value you need. Whether by spending worker tiles to adjust it up or down by one for each worker spent, or by using a tile ability you have managed to build. 

There are multiple tactics you can employ to score points. Sadly mine ended up not be that brilliant and ended up with me in last place. Luckily Diego didn’t lap me on the scoreboard. Which was Jonathan and mine ultimate aim in the game. 

How effective Diego’s tactic would have been if both Jonathan and I were also doing it, or even if one of us was, I don’t know. It would have reduced his scoring a bit I think.

Oh and there are opportunities to get extra “actions” during a turn too.

Yeah there is a lot to like about Castles of Burgundy. I definitely look forward to Jonathan bringing this ugly baby to the table again.