Lunchtime the magic of modern technology allowed Jonathan to send a “can you come out and play” message to me for a learning game of his Christmas present from his family Concordia.

Naturally being a person of no life and therefore free most nights, my response was in the positive.

This was as stated a learning game. So there were going to be misplays, and time spent looking up various rule questions.

I think our biggest mistake of the night for the game was not looking up how the end scoring worked.

BGG lists the mechanics for the game as card drafting, deck building, hand management and point to point movement. After we had completed the end scoring it was evident that there was an element of set collection as well. Which comes in the form of the personality cards you buy and the gods that they are aligned with. These act as multipliers in the end scoring (if we interrupted the rules correctly). So for instance, you have four cards for one god, then the points you gain for that gods scoring gets multiplied by the number of cards you have.

It is funny that this game has deck building in it as a mechanic. Deck building is one of Jonathan’s least favourite mechanisms. Me? I like the mechanic. I’ve not looked at all the starting decks, but I think they are unique to the colour you are. Well unique in that they are slightly different. I notice that for one card (can’t remember what it was called) Jonathan’s copy of the card was slightly different. It gave more money to him than my version gave to me. 

I think there may be a first player advantage in being able to build in cities to get resources. But that needs to be confirmed with more plays.

I wasn’t left speechless after playing Concordia. There was no “OMG this is amazing” moment. I had a little moment of glory blocking Jonathan for a turn or two. But it just came across as ok. It definitely has enough going for it to warrant another play. 

Last night was one of the “special” events that get organised at Fenland Gamers (my local gaming club). Which basically means some-one has a specific game they’d like to get to the table and play. So they host a gaming session to play that particular game. An invite is usually placed on the clubs Facebook page asking who would like to attend, making sure that people know there is a limited number of places available. 

The session last night was arranged specifically to play the amazing Viticulture with the extended board from Tuscany.

However Jonathan found himself at a loose end and asked if those attending could make it along to the venue earlier. He had a hankering to play Pandemic Iberia again.

For Jonathan to scratch that itch he needed me! He won’t have his own copy until Christmas or his birthday. I had received my replacement red microscope token and missing epidemic card only a couple of days earlier. Also to protect the cards in the game I had sleeved them. So my copy was ready to hit the table.

Katie hadn’t played this edition of Pandemic. Well it is a hot new game. So we recapped the rule changes and additions that were made to Iberia. 

We let Katie decide on how difficult the game would be. Our game used the “easy” setting of four epidemic cards.

We won our game. We hit three out of the four epidemic cards. And narrowly missed the fourth. If we hadn’t won we would have hit it. 

I’d like to have my next game of Iberia use one of its variants. I like the idea of the patient one, where cubes home in on the hospitals you build!

Our next game was a new one for me, but one I’ve been interested to try, Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age.

It’s a nice Yahtzee, push your luck style game. 

Not the most attractive game. However the wooden player boards and pegs were ok. The wooden dice felt nicer than the dice in Discoveries.

The player sheets where you are marking off the results of your dice rolls look intimidating to start with, but soon become clear.

It’s a nice game. Not amazing. But one I’d happily play again.

Jonathan and I  both LOVE Viticulture. I don’t think I’d be incorrect in saying that if we both had to draw up a top five games of all time Viticulture would be one of those games. For me it would be Jamey Stegmaier’s second game on that list. Which is frickin amazing. I really must do a click bait top ten games of all time list sometime. 

So you know how much we like Viticulture. But what impact would playing with the extended board make?

Katie and Diego hadn’t played Viticulture before. So a rules school was held for them. I think with the new board Jonathan and I were not at a great advantage having played before. 

I’m a big fan of the original Prisoner tv series (not that crap remake they did). And it’s hard not to make Number 6 references. Why do I feel like I can talk about The Prisoner whilst talking about Viticulture? Well for the whole game I took the number 6 slot on the wake up track. No one took it off me. Basically I was being given by the end of the game six unchallenged victory points. 

The territory control element this board adds to the game is a nice little touch, and a nice way to get some resources that may have been blocked off elsewhere. Plus at end game scoring a chance to add more victory points to your score. 

The extra seasons made more sense thematically. Plus it gave you more chance to do things. But with two basic workers and a grande worker you will have to pass one of the seasons at least in the early rounds until you train more workers.

Until the last round I was only harvesting one field. I hadn’t even planted the others. In fact I had sold one early on for the cash boost, and repeated later on for same reason. 

But being first to one or two actions allowed me to pick up the odd easy victory point.

On the final round I needed three points from somewhere on the board to push me over the finishing line. Jonathan managed to block two of them. But I was luckily able to get those from another route. Basically by buying back a sold field and planting on it (I had a windmill that gave me a point this way), and then selling a wine for a point. 

I was feeling very tense trying to pull off those three points. If I’d failed in pulling this off and have to go through another year, there is no way I’d win. It was all or nothing. Jonathan blocking me added to the tension I was feeling. But once I cracked the problem of making up the lost points, it was plain sailing.

Jonathan discovered at the end we had misplayed the pass rule in winter. Which we are getting to the bottom of at the moment. Sadly Jonathan couldn’t find the relevant bit in the rules. 

The extended board is a great addition to an already great game. Not sure I’d want to go back now to the regular one.

You know how I’m closing this blog post off now. Thanks to Jonathan (so you know who to blame) here are a couple of photos of me playing the games last night.

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!

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.

“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.