Saturday saw roughly seventy odd gamers turn up at the offices of Alley Cat Games to participate in the company’s first ever con. It also clashed with the start of Standard Showdown season at my FLGS. If I was going to miss taking my Simic deck out for a spin, playing games with Jonathan and trying prototypes was a bloody good alternative.

The day started with Jonathan picking me up at the end of the street I live in. Thanks to roadworks closing off Jonathan’s usual route on to the A1, we ended up on the A14 and a pleasant cross country route to Letchworth that avoided the A1 altogether.

Once we arrived in Letchworth we pulled over in the car park of the local Morrison’s to enter the post code for one of the recommended car parks. Which saw us deciding to sample their breakfast offerings before proceeding to the car park. It’s important to make sure you are fully caffeinated and have a full stomach when playing board games.

After registering at the door, Jonathan and I found a table and played our first game of the day, Hanamikoji. Hanamikoji is a recent addition to my collection, after buying it from a friend and member of Fenland Gamers. Neither of us had played the game before, so this was a learning game.

Hanamikoji is a really nice, quick, two player game. Love the two main mechanics of hand management and area control. Each round you have four actions to take that are used to manage your hand and influence which cards you play. However you only take each action once.

One action for example you have is taking four cards from your hand, splitting them into two piles of two, and your opponent chooses one pile and those cards go in front of the matching card in the middle on their side. The remaining two cards go in front of the matching cards on your side. I love this I split you chose action, and all the decisions involved in that alone.

If you like Bloodbowl Team Manager, which is basically an area control game also. But want something that has a similar core mechanic but plays quicker. Then this is worth a look.

I love the art. It’s very watercolour, pastel shades looking. It has that old traditional Japan look and feel to it.

Jonathan and I won a game a piece.

The next game we got to “play” was one high on Jonathan’s list of games to try, Chocolate Factory.

This was a prototype, the game will hit Kickstarter later in the year. And we only got to play three rounds. Well there were a few people keen on trying it. So it would have been rude to hog the game.

However I was pretty impressed with the mechanics and the way the game played. Jonathan pointed out that the graphic design of this prototype needed tweaking. However it already has been taking into account the tweaks suggested, and the changes were shown to us digitally.

I liked the drafting element at the start of each round that gave you an improvement to your factory, and a round only power and access to selling to a department store.

The moving tiles through the factory and your engine, is a nice touch and piece of theatrics. The ordering of improvements from the drafting is key. It determines activation order.

The competing to sell to the department stores, with points being awarded on whose sold the most to each store at the end of the game, gives a nice competitive touch to the game.

There looks to be a couple of paths to victory, either going for the department stores for points, or completing your private corner shop ones. You could go for a mix of the two.

We thought having a role card with a unique power, similar to the ones used in Marco Polo would be a cool improvement to the game.

Overall this looks like it’s going to be a great, fun, game.

At the end of the third round we went to end game scoring. I came second aka first loser, while Jonathan propped us all up at the bottom.

Ruthless had been a pirate themed game faintly on Jonathan’s radar. So I twisted his arm to try it out. We were there, there was a copy in the game library. It made sense to me.

The copy we played, was unplayed! Jonathan and I had to punch cardboard! After setting up, which we thought the rulebook could be clearer on (it was a little confusing), one of the Alley Cat staff/helpers stepped in to talk us through the game.

As soon as it clicked the game was a deckbuilder, I laughed. Jonathan hates deckbuilders.

As far as deckbuilders go, it’s ok.

The fixed number of rounds was an interesting idea. As was using a semi poker hand mechanic with recruited pirates in front of you to decide points at the end of each. The end of game bonus scoring was ok.

I’m just not sure being ok in this day and age is good enough. The bar for deckbuilders for me is Star Realms/Hero Realms. Price, replay ability, expansions, game play. It ticks all the boxes. Then on the big box deckbuilders, I have Marvel Legendary and Eminent Domain. Which are both really good. Ruthless kind of sits in the middle ground. Unless you really really want to play a pirate themed deckbuilder, I can’t see why you’d get it.

The records will show I won our game.

Jonathan and I both enjoy roll and writes. We have one or two in our collections. So I thought a chance to try Welcome To DinoWorld couldn’t be passed up.

I’m not sure why but the game left me feeling indifferent. Even now while writing this post I still can’t really put my finger on why.

Would tweaking how the dice are used, and who can use which dice help? Maybe.

There was a massive misplay we found out after the game, which potentially might have made a difference.

The actual sheets used in the game are quite pretty. Which at the moment is about the nicest thing I can say about the game.

The roll and write market is getting crowded. Apart from theme I’m not sure this stands out. But is more man in the crowd.

I was first loser, but finished above Jonathan.

We followed up by playing Wingspan with Scott. Unusual for me I went with a new tactic of birds on board, instead of egg spamming. It didn’t quite workout enough to get me the win. But in out tightest scoring game to date, I lost by four points. And Jonathan was beaten into first loser position by a single point. So your deduction skills will tell you Scott won.

We finished off our days gaming with a game of Nusfjord. I really was rusty on this. I had played it once nearly a year ago. So after a brief refresher, we settled into building our fishing communities and fishing fleets.

It looked at the end of the game that Jonathan and I were going to have to share the honours of first place. But under further review I had missed three points from shares that I owned. Which meant I was the winner.

Although we left at 6pm there was another five hours of gaming left for those that had the stamina, and more importantly (most likely) didn’t have a long distance to travel. And to be fair our journey time was just under a couple of hours. So we could have stayed longer I suppose. But I think about eight hours of gaming for us was about right.

Our journey home was uneventful, full of good conversation, and we delivered Scott home safely.

Naturally this post would not be complete without a photo of me in action, and thanks to Jonathan I’m able to avoid disappointing you.

Some thoughts

Despite having a great time. The day did confirm to me that these sort of things (such as Handycon and Airecon) which focus on playing games may not be for me. They reenforced my opinion that you need to be going with a bunch of friends. I didn’t see much mingling going on, it seemed more people playing with people they knew. Which means if that is the case, why don’t you just stay at home and play games with your friends? Or if you are intent on going away for a weekend from your usual haunts, going to a hotel or hostel to play?

Having said that for Jonathan and me this is the ideal one to attend. It’s the gaming equivalent of a day out in London. Next time with a bit more planning maybe we can take more of our friends along with us, and have a Fenland Gamers day out.

Alley Cat Games. Now I will give a caveat for this next statement in that I haven’t played every one of their games, so is based on the ones I have played so far. Which is most of them. I think they should drop the smaller games and concentrate on the big games. In the current market place that we have, games that are good at best just don’t cut it. Publishers need to be putting out great games to stand a chance of standing out from the crowd, get the sales, and be a success. Dice Hospital and my experience of Chocolate Factory meet that criteria. Sadly the smaller games fall into the former, and don’t cut it. The Alley Cat Games crew are a great crew that I want to see succeed and grow. And their strength seems to be the bigger box games. For me those smaller games are not their forte.

But it’s easy for me to say. I’m just an armchair critic. It’s not my money on the line here. And what do I know?

I want to end this rather long post with a big thanks to Alley Cat Games for organising this mini con. For inviting us into their home and being such gracious hosts.

I’d also like to say a big thanks to Jonathan for doing the taxi duties. And being a great gaming buddy throughout the day.

Thursday saw the chance to do some gaming with Jonathan, and play my first game of 2019. Which happened to be one of Jonathan’s Christmas Haul, Lancaster.

As usual this was a learning game, so we were making it up as we went along. Correction, reading the rules as we played. Yeah I know gamers out there will be having sharp intakes of breathe, tutting away in disgust that we hadn’t read the rules, watched the YouTube tutorial, downloaded and printed off the rules errata/FAQ (and memorised that also) before playing. But that’s how we roll.

Lancaster is a worker placement game, and we were playing the two player variant.

So for those with short attention spans and have had enough of this post already, the headline is I liked the game.

For those interested here is what I liked about the game.

The production of the components for the game is pretty solid. The battle and scoring rules cards were not actually cards but thick cardboard, more a tile than a card.

I loved the fact you could upgrade your workers. Thus making them more powerful, and unlocking the possibility of more locations you could chose as an action using the more powerful worker. But you then had the difficult choice of did this new more powerful worker get used to select one of these newly available slots, or did you use them in combat with the French?

You were also limited in the maximum number of workers you could recruit, but also you could never exceed the maximum power level. You were limited to a single worker at the maximum level. Although in the two player variant with the friendly house you could have more than one potentially.

I liked that when selecting an action you had to have a worker with the minimum strength indicated to be able to use it. You could then use a squire token to bolster your strength in the space. Why would you want to do that? To lock out your opponent from taking that action instead. On your opponents turn if they want to use the action instead of you, they have to place a worker on that space with a strength one more than the combined strength of your worker and the number of squires on the space with them.

The reason this is a thing is that you don’t get the action straight away. You only get it at the end of the round if you are still on the space.

The battles is a nice addition. Going to battle gets you an instant bonus, plus if the French are defeated at the end of the turn you get points allocated on strength of your forces committed to the battle. This means my opponents can help win the battle, and get a share of the spoils (victory points). If the French aren’t defeated everything slides down. Some consolation points are awarded, and you have one more round to add to your forces and hopefully defeat the French. If after the second round the French remain undefeated, the workers in the battle are captured, and can be bought back or you lose them basically back to your supply.

The voting at the end of the round for which new rules get added to the end of round scoring was ok.

I also liked that when it came round to taking the action on the space you could take the noble (if you didn’t already have them) or the action. But if you paid three coins you could do both. The more nobles you collected the bigger points bonus you got at the end of the game. A nice additional decision to make.

It’s also not a long game, it was four rounds I want to say, based on my fading memory.

I know the whole theme is medieval times, castles, knights, battling the French. But the theme is paper thin really.

In the end it was the end of game bonuses that enabled me to steal the win from Jonathan by 2 points.

Lancaster really is a nice worker placement game. If you like the mechanic/genre then you will enjoy this for sure.

Afterwards as you can see The Luxe had just gotten in the promotional drink toppers for the Spider-man Spider-verse movie. They look pretty cool.

I have to thank Jonathan for a great afternoons gaming, and the chance to try this game. And as all good award ceremony speeches, a big thank you to The Luxe once more for hosting the impromptu session.

I have admit I was a bit nervous about Wildlands and Jonathan.

We had been invited round Diego’s to play some games. Not entirely true, it was specific games we had been invited to play. Specifically Wildlands and Reykholt.

The arrangements and invite had been done at the Fenland Gamers session before Christmas. Jonathan and I had car shared over to Diego’s, and talked gaming stuff on the way.

So here we were all setup and ready to play, factions selected (I was trying the Undead faction) and the Hagmole promo ready to use as well.

But would Jonathan enjoy the game? It was a fantasy mini skirmish game after all. Not one of his favourite genres or themes.

Jonathan was the first to be hit by the Hagmole, which seemed unfair to him, because his mini on the space would just keep taking damage until he drew cards that enabled him to move away or it died. So stopped using it. Undid the damage it had inflicted, and carried on without it. It had only been included because it could be, and I was interested in what it did. It was ruining the experience for Jonathan. So no big deal to not use it.

Playing the undead was interesting. You get six figures instead of five, only two symbols to worry about for selecting a figure. Sadly only two cards that enable you to draw cards, and all the figures aren’t going to be the toughest on the map.

But I enjoyed playing them. Potentially my favourite faction out of the five.

Diego and I both agreed the game played better as three players than the two player games we had played.

Our game ended pretty close, with Jonathan grabbing the win. If Diego hadn’t been able to thwart my attempts to kill one of his figures so successfully on a couple of turns I think I could have stopped Jonathan from winning and grab the win for myself. In the end I killed Diego’s figure on Jonathan’s turn in a pre-emptive strike to try and survive Diego killing my figure on his turn. I’d spent so many cards trying to kill it previously I needed to see a return on my investment. But what I hadn’t catered for was Jonathan having enough to move and claim a crystal as well, on what was left of his turn.

Jonathan even enjoyed the experience after he had got the hang of things. The hand management mechanic was one I knew Jonathan would like. And it was in the end light and quick enough that he could enjoy it as well.

Our next game was Pickomino with the expansion. I don’t think this will be played without it again. Even with new players. But this was the first time that Diego had played the game with the expansion.

Jonathan surprisingly with his reputation of poor dice rolls in other games, won this game comfortably.

Our final game of the afternoon was No Thanks! During which some serious egg on faces occurred.

After our second game which I’d won, it dawned on me why don’t I just take every card, I’d win? The other players would have no cards and wouldn’t be able to win, so I’d win with a maximum score. This started some discussion and a turning to the rules to look for the bit that said players with no cards couldn’t win. We couldn’t find it. We did find the rule that said we deducted a point from our final score for each token we had in front of us at the end of the game. That was new, and something we weren’t aware of. But the puzzle remained where had we got this rule from?

We continued playing another couple of games but with the correct rules. The token deduction at the end made a big difference.

But how many games had we played incorrectly? Lots for sure. There was going to have to be some investigation into the source of how we ended up playing the game the way we had been.

I had an amazing afternoon of gaming with two great friends. I don’t think the year could have been ended on a better gaming high.

A big thank you to Diego and his family for sharing their home with us for the afternoon. A big thank also to Jonathan for driving.

Jonathan and I met up for a quiet Sunday afternoon of gaming at the super duper The Luxe Cinema.

Our first game was an opportunity for me to try Jonathan’s latest addition to his collection, the recently delivered Kickstarter copy of Dice Hospital.

I have to be honest the prototype that was shown at the UKGE 2017 didn’t grab me. Then as you read on last weeks write up for the December monthly meet up I got to look at the components (more on that later in the post.)

I’ll make this brief (phew after yesterday’s post I bet you need a break), I really liked this game.

I know I like quite a broad range of game types. But I do really enjoy worker placement games. Dice Hospital is a nice worker placement game.

First up hats off for including a player aid. Sometimes, more often than you’d like, games don’t include them, or more rare they do but are practically useless. These are fine and do the job.

I like the method for selecting first player each round. The lowest numbered ambulance chosen by a player is first player. Simple. But is it? There is a decision to make. Choosing the lowest numbered ambulance means your dice (they represent patients that need healing) are also low numbers. Which means it takes longer to heal them. Where the opposite is true for the higher numbered ambulances. Plus when you become the first player you get a blood bag token that is a point at the end of the game (if you haven’t used it). Or they can be used to heal a patient one step or change the colour of a die temporarily. So very useful to have. On top of all this, that low numbered ambulance may not have the coloured dice that you need.

Although the first player rolls the dice, and starts allocating them to ambulances based on the simple rule of placing lowest value dice first (starting at ambulance number one). And here is the bit I like “Where there are multiple dice of the same value but different colours to place, the player to the right of the First Player decides in which ambulance they are placed and in what order.” (Taken from rulebook) This involves the other players, and means that the other player gets to throw a spanner in the works potentially by putting inconvenient coloured dice together.

Each round you get to choose a specialist card or department tile from the face up display. I like this you get to chose between upgrading the actions you can choose each turn with the department tile, or recruit an extra worker in the form of a specialist that will also have an ability. So you have that tough choice to you get that department tile that has an action you really want? Or do you get that specialist and their really powerful ability that combos with one of your department tiles, and allows you to do more on a turn?

And that last bit touches on another nice mechanic of the game, combos between the specialists and the department tiles.

Let’s revisit the whole production component thing. Oh before I do, a little troll of my friend Gavin from Jonathan. Gavin did you like Jonathan’s exclusive art from the artist of the game that he has?

In my previous post where I commented on the card thickness, and the nice linen finish. I checked the Kickstarter stretch goals (relevant ones below).

They had goals to improve the quality of the cards in the game. I don’t think they upgraded the card stock enough. They are too thin for my liking. And that has been the opinion of the two people that handed hard cash over for the game also. Jonathan has sleeved his cards.

Which brings me to my next point of the custom insert in the main box. It’s not up to the job. It doesn’t cater for the cards being sleeved, nor does it provide enough space (only just) to store all the department tiles properly. Jonathan is using both boxes to store the game, but Gavin was unable to store everything in the box when using the ambulance miniatures. With a bit of thought the insert could accommodate sleeved cards, and not just the department tiles of the base game but the Kickstarter exclusive ones also. The space is there. In the deluxe add-ons there is also a dice tray that can’t be stored if built. This is just bad planning.

Jonathan has replaced his player score tokens with wooden cubes. They look and work better than the near useless cardboard ones included. Which maybe thematic but very impractical.

Why Alley Cat Games didn’t allow the round tracker to be attached to the score board I don’t know. It makes more sense. And another upgrade Jonathan has also now done himself. Otherwise this can easily be knocked.

There are also stickers included, that I don’t even know why they are there.

Jonathan’s ambulances seemed to have come out better than Gavin’s. But they are still just eye candy, and table theatrics. I heard rumours an expansion might make more use of them mechanically. It’s a shame that wasn’t included in the game already.

On the production side it’s the minor details that got forgotten, or not executed to the same standard as the rest of the components. But despite these little niggles, Dice Hospital is a fun worker placement game.

Oh Jonathan won the game by 4 points.

Our second game for this little gaming session was Reykholt. We played with a promo that gave each player a random one off bonus. They were a nice addition that speeded up the start of the game. It’s a shame these weren’t included in the base game as an additional thing to add to each game. I think they are that good, that maybe once the base game has been learnt players should include these all the time.

Completing the double for the afternoon, Jonathan stomped to victory with this game also.

Afterwards we briefly talked politics, and the current chaos in the country.

I had a great afternoon despite losing. The Luxe were great hosts.

Yesterday I was once more welcomed into the home of Diego and his family to play some games.

The game we ended up playing for the afternoon was the latest Martin Wallace game published by Osprey Games, called Wildlands.

Diego and I first saw the game on the Osprey stand at Tabletop Games Live at the end of September. The slots to try the game didn’t work for us, and Osprey forgot to mention there was a copy in the rather small games library (something we found out after the show) for people to use. But the explanation we had of the game by the Osprey staff, and examining the game components convinced both of us that this was a game we’d like, and should be on our wish list.

About a month later, just after Essen, Wildlands dropped onto the shelves of stores. Somehow a copy found it’s way to mine.

Yesterday was the first time Diego and myself got to play the game.

Wildlands is a light miniatures skirmish game with a hand management element.

The game comes with a double sided board, that has a different map on each side. There are 4 unique factions included, that have very different play styles, and rather nice insert trays to organise everything. Which even just about takes sleeved cards. The miniatures in the game come with a wash applied, and look awesome. So you really don’t have to paint them. The overall component quality, and the touches mentioned is outstanding.

In about two and a half hours we played 4 games. Which is very quick really. Set up is also very quick, 5 minutes max. The longest hardest part of the setup is deciding on a faction to play. Diego and I only played 2 factions each. But each faction we chose, we played twice.

The rules are very streamlined, and quick to learn. Which means such things as combat, line of sight are very uncomplicated, and aided greatly by some nice graphic design touches. No looking up stuff on tables in rule books, and measuring stuff out.

Like Memoir 44 you have a hand of cards that determine what you can do on a turn. The hand management is crucial to being successful. Diego was far better at this than me. I think I remember one turn when he did nothing and just drew cards. I did this a few turns through out the 4 games. It’s nice that you can only have a max hand size of 7 cards, and only draw up to 3 cards at the end of your turn.

Each faction feels unique, and plays differently. But they seem fairly balanced. Or in the pairings we had they did. Which is why it was cool we played our factions twice. The first time was almost a getting to know my faction game. Ok I lost all 4 games. But none of the games were wipe outs. They were ending with scores of 5-3, or 5-4. So pretty close really.

I like the setup and the use of location cards. Each player gets 10 location cards at the start. They assign a card/location face down to each character in their team, and the remaining 5 cards get passed to your opponent on your left. You receive 5 cards back from your right. Those 5 cards are used to determine where you place your shards that you need to collect. This is a great mechanic, because you are able to control (depending on the cards) where you opponents place shards and set potential traps.

Not having to reveal the positions of your whole team at the start of the game is also pretty cool. You do have to reveal at least one of your team at the start of each turn, until they are all revealed. And you can reveal more during your turn if you so wish. This enables you to set traps, hold back until it’s the most advantageous to reveal them.

Another nice mechanic is that if one of your team is killed, then those cards aren’t dead. You can use them to claim shards.

The simplicity of combat, line of sight, and cover helps keep the game flowing. Being able to interrupt a players turn is a nice mechanic, which we did use. But not to any great extent in a 2 player game. Diego and I were both keen to try the game with more players.

One of the things that I asked Osprey about was future plans for the game. Already a new expansion is out The Undead (my copy should arrive this week due to UPS losing a delivery to the store I pre-ordered from) that adds a new team plus play mechanic. Next year we see another team plus a new map board coming to the game. Because the secret to the longevity of this game is the support of it with expansions. Where Osprey and Wallace take the game after that who knows? But Osprey did give the impression they had a bit of stuff lined up.

It was a blast playing the game with Diego. As always he was a fantastic host.