The Friday that launches not just into the weekend but also half term always seems to have a more relaxed feel to it.

At The White Lion Hotel Diego, Jonathan and myself made it along to play games and get our weekend and half term off to a great start.

Our gaming started off with Inis. Inis had a lot of buzz, and the usual dash to get hold of it. 

Let’s deal with the main critism about the game. The dire box art. Which looks more like it came out of a just completed colouring book. Not the most attractive piece of box art.

Inis is quick to pick up. Within two rounds or so you get a good idea for the majority of the rules.

The card drafting works well. Being able to change your draft choices is a nice touch. A small limited pool of cards is also helpful. So you soon know all the cards and start making plans on what you’d like to draft to try and implement your plans.

The combat or clashes as they are called felt weird to start with. But we got used to it. It’s functional, maybe even thematic.

Having three win conditions means you are constantly having to be not just aware of your progress towards them, but also of your opponents.

The area majority mechanic worked well. I liked getting additional cards to play from being a chieftain of an area.

The Epic Tales cards add a nice element and additional option to the game.

I do like the unique look that the tiles have. Plus despite the misdirect of the box cover art, Inis actually looks good on the table.

Inis is a nice game. I’ll definitely play again. But Kemet, Scythe and Cry Havoc are easily better in my opinion. 

Our second game was Santorini. Every since getting Santorini it’s been burning a hole on my table. I’ve really wanted to get it to the table to play. 

They claim on the box it’s a 2-4 player game. But 4 player seems tacked on as a team mode. It’s really a 2 player abstract game. But I was curious how it would play as a 3 player game.

This is a super simple game to learn. Choose one of your two pieces, move it, and build. That’s basically it. Get one of your pieces to level 3 of a building and you win. Oh when going up, you can only go up one level at a time. Can’t make a move, you lose. 

But despite being so simple, there is a depth to the game. It’s almost chess like at times.

Ok I’m stating the obvious but Santorini looks beautiful. The whole 3D look of the buildings as you build, and board. Stunning. I can’t think of an abstract game I have or seen (although this is very limited knowledge) that looks this gorgeous.

The production value throughout the whole game is really high. Plus with this Kickstarter Zeus edition that I have the little extras are really nice.

We played two games of the basic rules. Then mixed it up playing with beginner God cards. Which add an extra layer to the game that makes it even better. The God cards give you a special power to use during the game or in case of the one Jonathan had win condition. These were a really fun addition.

There are a lot of God cards, thirty or so in the base game. Then with the Golden Fleece expansion even more, plus Hero cards. So there is a hell of a lot of replayability and variety to be had with this game.

We had a blast playing Santorini. Even when we lost we were laughing and smiling. I want to say this game is an absolute delight to play. This will be back to the table real quick. Instant classic for me.

Hey it was Friday, we played games, you know how this story ends. With poor diet decisions disguised as a stuffed naan wrap with questionable meat, salad and chilli sauce.

Yesterday for work I got to go to the BETT Show at the Excel place in London with my colleague and friend Dale.

Basically under the disguise of being an education show aimed at teachers etc, it is in reality a hunt for loot on the bosses dime! Yep real life Munchkin. 

I’m pretty happy with my haul of loot. Free pens are great for bribing colleagues. Well technically I’m not bribing them I’m buying their souls very cheaply. I’m not sure they realise the real cost of my “generosity”.

Didn’t have to buy coffee during the day because we managed score free coffee from a stand. It was pretty good coffee. They actually had a hipster looking barista there making it to order. Unlike a lot of the others that did coffee that were using those pod coffee machines.

Dale got to witness how slow a striking king cobra snake is compared to me eating a chocolate covered mini ring donut from a chocolate fountain.

All in all a great first BETT for me, with many plans on spending my line managers budget in the next week or two.

It was seven when I finally arrived at The White Lion. Jonathan and Diego were two or three turns into The Streets of Commonville.

While trying to solve the crime, there were plenty of opportunities to have banter. Especially at the expense of Jonathan (who is fifty percent of the games design team!) 

Like Jonathan I too was a little rusty on the games rules. Last time I played the game as “Darren Consulting Game Tester” was in February of last year. While for Jonathan it was June of 2016. Which opened up the opportunity for lines like “did you not watch the Watch It Played video?” Or “Eric Lang knows how to play his games”.

 Jonathan tried to misdirected us from his Dr Kinky alter ego in the game. But in the end the evidence clearly pointed to Dr Kinky being the guilty party.

We managed to arrest Dr Kinky with a minute or two left. 

The idea came up of adding Eric Summerer as a promo character to the game. Maybe as a new cop to be played and have a matching suspect tile of Eric Summerer the dirty cop.

A great day out, a fun evening gaming. The weekend started well.

The start of Friday had so much promise with my car headlights illuminating the flecks of snow from the light snow flurries as I drove across the Fenland landscape in the dark.

The snow got heavier, but sadly wasn’t settling. I’d been looking forward to our first real snow since about 2010. Loki and Nico hadn’t seen snow. I was hoping to introduce them to snowballs.

Luckily our weekly Friday night gaming meet up at The White Lion is the perfect antidote to the mornings disappointment, and a great way to get the weekend started.

Our evening started off with a learning game of Dark Moon.

You look at the games rule book and think “wow this is a complicated game”. But in reality it’s pretty simple once you start playing. 

One of us was a traitor. But who was it? I knew it wasn’t me. Was it Jonathan or Diego? 

Ever since Jonathan and I first played Memoir ’44 it has been a running joke about his bad dice rolls.

That running joke was all the evidence I needed to accuse Jonathan of being the traitor. 

Dark Moon was ok with three players. But I would like to try with higher player counts. I think identifying the traitor will be harder, more accusations and votes being made. Overall more what the game is all about.

Although this game has a sci-fi theme. The theme is almost none existent. It could almost be any theme.

Jonathan thought the tasks and events were too easy to complete. But I’m not sure. It’s a nice touch that you can adjust the difficulty of the game for either side using one of the variants suggested in the rule book.

Oh yeah, Jonathan was the traitor and totally failed to stop us winning.

House of Borgia was back to the table completing a theme of betrayal, bluffing and lying for the evening.

It’s amazing what a big difference playing the game correctly makes! 

I enjoy the liars dice mechanic of this game. I really must get my copy of Perudo (which is the other name for Liars Dice) to the table.

Luckily for me I was the most “sneaky” and won the game. 

Do I have to tell you how we finished the evening of great gaming off? By celebrating with meat of unknown origin soaked in chilli source, some “salad”, all held together within a wrap. 

I’m looking forward to next weeks meet up. Finally Mechs vs Minions gets to the table.

Fridays wasn’t just Crackerjack for British kids on tv. Over on BBC2 it was tv shows like The Water Margin and Monkey also.

I loved those shows. Yes they were dubbed. But they had great stories that caught my imagination. The struggle between the rebels in Liang Shan Po against the corrupt officials. Or the moral tales and humour of Monkey protecting Tripitaka a monk on a spiritual quest to find some scrolls, aided also by Pigsy and Sandy, two guards from heaven punished by being changed to look like “monsters” and to help, if I remember correctly.

I look them up now and I’m surprised how few episodes there are of these two great shows. Time and fading memories seem to have made me think there were way more episodes.

Now grown up me has a new Friday routine. It’s Friday Evening Gaming at The White Lion. Last night was the first one of the new year.

It was just Jonathan and myself last night.

After getting a pint of our usual beverage (Heck we have a usual! I think we are regulars now. How did that happen?), Jonathan and I had a two player game of the just arrived House of Borgia.

House of Borgia is Liars Dice with a twist or two.

I’m not going to say much about the game now. It works as a two player game. But this is a game that needs to be played with the higher end of players that the game supports, so 4 – 6 players I think. So once I’ve had a chance to play the game with that sort of player count I’ll go into the game in more depth.

I will say the production values of the game are amazing. Really high quality.

Our second and final game of the evening was another new arrival Batman the Animated Series Dice Game.

This is Zombie Dice with a Batman theme. Steve Jackson games have gone the AEG Love Letter route here. Take a classic, great, fun game, tweak a rule or two but keep what made the original so much fun.

This version is limited in that it is capped at a maximum of four players. That’s thanks to its first change to the classic Zombie Dice formula. Players choose randomly one of the four villain tokens at the start. So you are playing as a Batman villain in this game. Your villain has a special ability. I had the riddler that allowed me to roll four dice at the start of my turn and a reroll them if they were all alarms. Jonathan had Pioson Ivy who could ignore one blue Batman symbol on a dice. You get the idea.

There are ten great looking dice (not thirteen as in Zombie Dice), and you play to thirty points not thirteen. Plus there is a rule tweak to what happens when you can’t draw any more dice.

I really liked these additions to the core game. They improve the game, while not getting in the way or over complicating things. The designers behind Dalek Dice should take note.

This could replace Zombie Dice as a light filer game for smaller groups for me.

I hope that Steve Jackson games have promo characters to release for this game. I’d get them. I’m going to approach AEG to see if I can buy 120+ of the Love Letter Batman tokens to use with this game to track scores. Now that would be a great pimp out for this game.

Having finished our pints of Thatchers by the end of Batman the Animated Series Dice Game, it was time to return back to real life, pick up a kebab, and deal with reality once more. 

Yes it had been a shorter session this time. But sometimes life dictates that is the case. Still a great evening though.

Last night saw our second Fenland Gamers Meetup of the holiday season.

Attending this one we had Jonathan’s brother and his wife (or Debbie’s mum and dad as they are also known) who were visiting from Malta, join us. They were “enjoying” our seasonal cold snap of the past week. Jo made a rare guest appearance, while Debbie’s bo Nath joined Debbie in attending. Which meant Jeff and myself were the only none Warren family folks there. 

The lovely large wooden table at The White Lion was easily big enough to accommodate use splitting into two play groups.

So Jonathan, Jo and mum and dad split off to play Imhotep. While the rest of us holed up in our castle to fight off the attacking horde of monsters in Castle Panic.

We were playing just the classic base game of Castle Panic, despite me having the expansions. Debbie and Nath hadn’t played it before, Geoff had (?), whilst this would be my second game. Besides adding in the expansions would require some fiddling around intergrating them.

I like Castle Panic. Well I must do if it’s still in my collection after playing it. Plus I bought the expansions for it. Which I wouldn’t do if I didn’t like the game.

It is a nice co-op game, brutal, but nice! The publisher/designer really thought about the game adding in variants, and ways to adjust the difficulty level up and down.

And although it’s a co-op, like Marvel Legendary if you all win by beating the game there is also a winner! In Castle Panic the number of monsters you kill are totalled up and the highest score is the “Master Slayer”.

We got over run and lost. But I don’t think we did that bad, we had nine monster tiles left in the bag. Granted two of those tiles were boss monsters. But still we were close to success I think. It was visible on the horizon. 

In a break from the rules, we did total up points for everyone, despite losing. Our Master Slayer was Jeff. 

After all that fighting it was time to head off to the nearest inn, and regale each other with stories of our heroic deeds over flagons of mead in Braggart Second Edition.

This was just being received by Kickstarter backers just before Christmas. Well I’m assuming that because John at The Hobbit Hole (my FLGS) had just got his box of the game that made up his store level pledge.

I have to say when John opened the box and saw what was inside, I swear he wet himself in excitement. He’s really a big fan of the game.

Yeah I bit and asked him about the game. Initially I wasn’t sold on it. Wait story telling I thought, I’ve got to make up stories? I have StoryCubes for that. Then John opened a game up, showed me the cards and how the stories are created and I was sold on the game.

This game is good fun. We ended up playing it twice. 

It has a little take that in it. There is hand management, simple drafting. Quick to learn. We learnt from the rules sheet, within a couple of turns had it learnt. 

I thought the game would take ages to play based on the size of the deck. But we got through that deck a lot quicker than I thought we would.

As you can see from the above photo some of the stories you come up with can be funny. And the interaction with the liar cards just adds to this.

Nope this is a fun lightish game, replaces Fluxx for me I think. And that’s despite Jeff winning both games.

Our final game of the evening was King of Tokyo. 

While we were duking it out for control of Tokyo. The other group were on their second game of Pandemic. At one point we over heard them say “go to Tokyo”. We chipped in “no don’t go to Tokyo! It’s a mess.”

Unusually for games I’ve played Jeff won with a points win. Usually the games have ended with a single monster standing on top of the corpses of their defeated opponents. 

We also only had one player eliminated. That player was Nath and it was Debbie that finished him off!

Ok by the time Jeff got his “boring” victory, none of us had lots of health left. It could have been my victory due to a knock out if I’d have gotten another go. But hey that’s the way the dice roll.

A really great evenings gaming. Let’s do it again next year!