Category Archives: game night

game night

FEG@WL 4Nov16

FEG@WL, Fenland Gamers, game night

It’s Friday, it’s five to five and it’s Crackerjack! Oh no wait it’s six and it’s Friday Evening Gaming at The White Lion.

I love starting my weekends this way. Gathered with old friends and making new ones, playing great games, enjoying great beverages, and finishing the evening off with “meat by-products” in a naan with salad and chilli sauce from one of the finest cut-my-own-throat dibbler wanna-be’s in Wisbech. 

Last night was no different. Lucia and Will joined us for the first time. And it was great meeting them. Despite Lucia winning our game of Love Letter Batman , and me not getting a single point. 

It’s one of the things I love about Fenland Gamers as a club. It’s not about winning (ok it might be) but about having a good time. It’s not an uber competitive must win at all costs, throw a temper tantrum if you don’t win. 

We have friendly banter, a laugh and joke about losing, and making sure I finish higher than Jonathan. 

Our second game of the evening was a first time for all of us but Jonathan. But he hadn’t played it for a long while. So it was kinda a level playing ground.

Oh the game Finca. This apparently according to Jonathan is a hard to get game now days. Well unless as Rocket argues I want it more than him, and I bribe one of his kids to “relocate” the game to my collection for me.

It’s a nice game. It makes great use of a rondel disguised as the sails of a windmill or finca as it is called in the game, to collect resources (fruits) and delivery tokens (donkeys) to complete various orders around this island you are on to villagers.

You get four one off use power ups that if not used give you points for each one left. But sometimes you want that power up to give you that little tactical boost.

On each of the zones/areas on the board are a small pile of orders to complete. Clear six(?) of these piles from around the island and the game ends and it’s down to adding the points up. In the meantime when a pile has been completed, a bonus token is awarded to the player with the majority of the indicated fruit type on the token on their completed.

History and my game play tracking app will record I lost, while Will won.

Our final game of the evening was a game that really does not get enough love Bohemian Villages. Jonathan and I love this game. It’s easy to teach and quick to learn. A blast to play. 

Jonathan has the new promo mini expansion from the Brettspiel Advent Calendar 2016. This basically adds three new tokens to the game that you can claim one of if you score thirteen or more on your dice roll. One token is a one off use that anables you to change two dice to a side of your choice. The other two give permanent abilities that either allow you to add one to a dice value or subtract one from a dice value.

I went for the add one to a dice value early on. I found that very useful through out the game. Jonathan got both of the permanent tokens. Which we both agreed at the end was over kill, you only really need one of them. 

But this promo is a nice little addition to the game. It gives you another thing you can do with your dice. I think I’d always play with it (if I had it).

Somehow I had a mare this game and ended up last again! With Jonathan who had been trailing all game taking the victory! 

So another Friday without a win! But despite that I had a blast. That journey to last place each time was fun. 

After a little gaming geek type chat, it was off to binge on “meat by-products” in naan, to bring a great evening to an end.

FEG@WL Extended Edition! 

FEG@WL, Fenland Gamers, game night

With half term coming to an end Fenland Gamers celebrated it with an extended Friday evenings gaming session. 

Our extended session started off with Jeff, Jonathan and myself playing Piece o’ cake. Which is no longer in print. However it is coming out again rethemed around pizza. 

This really simple “I split, you choose” mechanic based game is really deceptive. 

The splitting the cake into enough pieces for each player can be really really tough. You are trying to split it so you get left with something of use for yourself, whilst tempting the others with pieces that won’t score them too many points or give them an advantage. 

Then again choosing which slice to take can be just as tough a decision.

No despite its apparent simplicity this is a nice quick filler game. Don’t be surprised to see the pizza version in my collection at some point in the future.

The history books recorded that Jonathan won the game.

Our second game of the evening was Roll for the Galaxy. 

Yep I know what you are thinking, “wtf how did you get Jonathan to play a sci-fi themed game?” 

Well like BA in the A-Team and getting BA in the air, we had to use copious amounts of drugs, brainwashing and hire some of the best hostage negotiators to get Jonathan at the table to play this game!

And you know what? Jonathan enjoyed the game. Yeah I know. I have to respect Jonathan a lot. Despite knowing the theme was one he didn’t like, he still gave it a shot. 

Our game will have the history books recording a victory for Jeff. However that was down to a split decision by the judges because we tied on the victory points. But his number of credits and dice in his cup broke the tie.

Next up to the table was Splendor, with the official playmat being used. 

That playmat may seem expensive. But it is a really nice mat. It feels quality, thicker than the playmats you get for the likes of Magic etc. Plus there are some nice setup prompts reminding you the correct number of gems to use Baer on players , and the same for patron tiles.

After taking an early lead and getting the first patron I wasn’t prepared for Jeff’s engine kicking in and taking him to the victory. Jonathan and I tied for last place.
We were joined by Diego and Les, with no sign of Debbie. So Ticket to Ride hit the table. 

I was totally and utterly shit at the game this time. I got blocked out of completing one of my two starting tickets. And it tanked from their. 

Jeff once more walked away with the victory. Are you getting a theme here with the games we played?

Luckily I managed to avoid any “banter” for being last.

After establishing that Debbie had not died from her cold and turned into a zombie, Bohemian Villages hit the table.

Well I think you can guess who won the game. But it was fun played my with five players. And even more fun with Jonathan coming in last with a really low score! Yes some friendly banter was had.

Our final game of the evening was the same game that started the evening.

Long story short Jeff won this too.

This was a great extended gaming session. 

Finally I don’t think we have enough pictures of me. So here are some taken by Jonathan during the evening of fun!

Ramble on

Fenland Gamers, Game day, game night, zombicide

Oh wow I’ve managed to write a second post that has a title of a Led Zep song title! 

We really are lucky at the Fenland Gamers in the locations we play at. 

Thanks to the kindness of The White Lion Hotel we had use of the lovely big table to play on yesterday. We get to use this fantastic table 99% of the time we game there. And I think I speak for all the members in our appreciation and gratitude for being allowed to game there, and the warm welcome we get.

Yesterday Jeff and I met up lunchtime to play War of the Ring (First Edition) before the evenings entertainment of Epic Zombicide.

I’d never played War of the Ring before, but it was on my list of games to play, along with Battle of the Five Armies. Plus being a Tolkien fan who wouldn’t want to play it? 

I chose being the Fellowship over the forces of Mordor.

The turn order isn’t too bad to learn, from there its specifics.

My overall tactic of using my armies to draw out the armies of darkness, giving the ring bearer a clear path to Mordor, was confusing to Jeff.

It meant the ring bearer was sitting in Rivendell for a few turns. Even separated from the fellowship. 

The main flaw with my plan? Apart from poor implementation? It left too many easy points for Jeff to pick up undefended.

I enjoyed the game a lot. I liked the ability to pass when taking actions. It meant that I could choose which actions by Jeff to react to. Which is handy when he has more actions to take on most turns (unless he’s ultra unlucky with his dice rolls).

This is a long game to play and set up. However when playing the time flies. There is little downtime. 

This is definitely a game I want to play more of. There is a lot to this game, and it does need multiple plays. And my words above should really be considered initial thoughts, and only scratch the surface of the game.

With Sauron enjoying his comprehensive victory, it was time to see what the zombie horde could do.

Yep it was time for Epic Zombicide. That’s right day two of back to back Epic Zombicide. How insane is that?

So today’s Epic Zombicide was a three by six map that Jeff and I put together.

By the time Debbie had arrived after finishing work, we had setup and were ready to fight for our survival.

In this Epic! scenario we once again had to make it to one of the two exits at the other end of the board. However we also on the way stop in one of the buildings to find a map we needed before leaving.

With that tweak I felt that the game was more balanced and a little more challenging than the previous days initial trial of Epic Zombicide.

Naturally tweaking the draw deck for zombies is another way to increase the difficulty level. Like I could include cards that spawn out of the sewers, tweak the search deck with more aargh cards etc.

I really do like how this plays for introducing noobs to the game. And it’s nice having a location games of this scale can be played. Plus as one of the photos above shows we can get nachos! 


I just need to finish off my inserts now for the final two boxes. Which is basically the tokens, cards, and characters.

Yesterday really was a great afternoon and evening of gaming. I had a totally enjoyable time. Oh and we out ran the zombie horde! 

Song Remains the Same

Fenland Gamers, formula d, Game day, game night, zombicide

Yesterday at my place of employment on our day off, my colleague and I met up to take on the zombie horde in Epic Zombicide!

I set up a six by five city map, with our soul objective of getting from our start position to one of the two exit points.

I’d tailored the search deck with a mixture of weapons, and useful stuff (no food basically). We were up against regular zombies, brutes, skinners and toxic zombies. Plus those crowz. 

Throughout the map were randomly placed cars to be searched and driven. In the car search pile I did have one aargh card shuffled in. Just to give it a little tension while searching.

We managed to get everyone out. And that’s despite whenever we thought we would investigate a building it only made things worse. The building I was going to look in revealed a fattie. While the one my colleague was going to go into introduced an abomination onto the map! Luckily it was a regular abomination with three hit points, and I had a weapon that did three damage.

For me this randomly thrown together scenario and objective was easy. Maybe too easy. But for introducing a noob to the game like my colleague, I think this was pitched nicely at the right level.

Tomorrow it’s more Epic Zombicide. I may step it up by putting an objective that forces us into a building to achieve before making a dash to the exit point.

Last night saw the start of season two of our Formula D League.


Spoiler alert, the Formula D machine that is Katie continued off where she left off from the inaugural season of our league, with a win.

Katie won the first season with a clean sweep of victories.

For our second season we upped our game and moved on to the advanced rules. We haven’t gone “complete” advanced and started using weather and deciding our own wear points. That will be season three. 

In the meantime we are still wondering what exactly we have to do to beat Katie.

During both laps there were brief moments when I was in front. But on both occasions that lead was squandered somehow. Most of the time I was battling it out with Jonathan for second place. 

Somehow in the last third of the final lap  I went from second place to fourth! Debbie did amazing to come up and take third from me on the final two corners.

In fact I’m still in shock.

Wow the advanced rules! Having all those   different wear points. It makes decisions like over shooting, collisions, dropping gears far more “interesting”. They all have different impacts on the various aspects of your wear points. And severly  limit the number of times you do any of them. 

The overshoot spin out rule on corners is cool, and adds even more consequences to the action.

Jonathan particularly liked the changes to the pit stop rule. Which made it more realistic. And I did like it too. Like a real pit stop the only thing that gets repaired are the tires, plus you have to roll for how quick the tire change was done. Brilliant.

Plus we now get debris on the track from collisions etc. Cool!

Yeah the advanced rules are fun, forcing you to be more thoughtful in your driving! Love them.

But who will dethrone Katie?

Shadows of Porta Nigra

Fenland Gamers, game night

Finally Porta Nigra hit the table. That’s another one off the pile of shame. Which is getting smaller and smaller.

So how did this bit of shocking news happen?

It all started with an innocent Facebook post enquiring what games members of the Fenland Gamers group were playing this weekend. I’d got nothing planned, except continue making inserts to organise Zombicide. So I was curious if others were enjoying life, the universe, etc. 

Not long after posting this probing question I received an invite from Jonathan to play some games at a long time Fenland Gamers haunt.

This was the first time either of us had played the game, so we were learning from the rule book (once again – yep we tend to break that gamer rule about not doing this).

It took a turn or three to get the hang of what’s what within the game. But it was a quick game to pick up.

I liked the use of the players deck to control the duration of a round. That was neat. 

Having the player choose two or three actions depending on the card from the available ones on it, with a mechanism to take extra actions, was really neat. 

Despite the limited choice you still have to make some tough decisions, the first being which action card to play from a hand of two. Then which actions and the order of them. 

You are having to manage your resources, aiming for majorities in each building area, whilst trying to score as many points for your building. 

Jonathan managed to get a bonus card that gave him 30 points at the final scoring. Which put huge pressure on me to try and negate that. That pressure only increased when that bonus got power up’d to over 50 points. It’s only in the third and final round was I able to cut that damaging point surge to twenty odd points with my own 30 points surge.

I loved the end of round scoring where you counted up number of building blocks used to build your buildings so far to split between money and points. I went for a fifty fifty split each time. 

This is not a low scoring game I beat Jonathan by 2 points, 254 to 252. Which was much much closer than both of us thought it would be.

When the light was just right we got some awesome shadows on the board from our buildings. Plus I have an excuse to use a photo of me that is really all about the shadows taken by Jonathan.


Porta Nigra is a lovely game that looks attractive when you are playing it. I love that 3D element of it. 

We will definitely play this again. The problem is when now?

A great afternoon of gaming, thank you Jonathan for the invite.

Achtung Baby!

FEG@WL, Fenland Gamers, game night

It’s been a very quiet week from me on here and that’s been down to “manflu” taking me out for most of the week.

Luckily after going through the worst patch Wednesday night and Thursday, things started to improve. The downside of the bad patch being having to miss a first playthrough of Escape from Colditz that Jonathan and I had just got through the post.

So Friday was once again on us, I was feeling much better, not great, but functioning. So FEG@WL was a go.


So with Jonathan putting on his German prison guard hat, Deigo, Les and myself formed an orderly line in the middle of the courtyard to plan our Escape from Colditz.

Opening the box, this game oozes theme, and I just love the production quality of the game. A lovely touch was the separate history booklet that was included. Rightly so much thicker than the rule book.

We played with the new “updated/modified” rules of this 75th Anniversary edition. I will say the rules aren’t that clear. Ideally they should have reworked this making them easier to follow. Looking at them for a first time I found them a little difficult to follow.

All I can say is we had a blast playing this game. It really was a lot of fun. 

Yes there is that competitive element on the prisoner side with the first getting two prisoners out being the winner. But you also have a collaboration side as well.

In the early game I was deliberately taking out guards to give my fellow escapees a window of opportunity to move around without threat. I also hit on the idea of it getting the inner solitary confinement cells full so I’d get placed in the outer one and need less items to escape one let out!

We would be swapping escape equipment making sure Jonathan had no idea of who had what. That way we kept him guessing how we would be trying to get out.

We’d even be giving equipment to aid escape when a run for freedom was being made.

We’d make dummy runs to try and distract Jonathan.

There was one moment on my escape when Jonathan really should have arrested my prisoner instead of blocking me. But I’d tried putting doubt in his head, suggesting he’d missed some-one else’s plan. I couldn’t believe it when he blocked me, Jonathan thought he was blocking my escape. Which he hadn’t I just went out the other way open to me. The other way he’d missed. The other way to freedom!

I wasn’t the first to escape. That honour fell to Les. We had a dual escape going on, the other escapee being Deigo. This was presenting Jonathan with some hard decisions to make. We liked watching him squirm!

I was getting very few opportunity cards to help my escape because I was doing my usual rolling high! While Les was pulling loads of them.

We did find that maybe the rule about getting of solitary was maybe a little broken. The rules state you needed to roll a double to get out. So we found there were sometimes several turns where you could do nothing while you waited to roll that double to get some-one out, or draw an opportunity card that got a pow out. We may house rule this next time to even things out.

I’d highly recommend this blast from the past, if you can get a copy (Esdevium had sold out before they did their weekly update sheet!!) I will warn you it’s a long game. We cut our game short because of time, we’d taken 30 turns approximately in 2 hours. So you may want to pencil in an afternoon playing this.

This was a really fun evening of gaming. A great way to start half term.

FEG@WL 14Oct16

FEG@WL, Fenland Gamers, game night

A bit like Crackerjack when I was growing up, it was Friday, it was 6pm, it was time for FEG@WG. Not quite as snappy or as popular as Crackerjack, and also not at five to five!

The first game of the evening for the four amigos that had assembled to play games was Splendor.

Deigo crushed this game. An easy win he put down to the many defeats he’d suffered at the hands of his partner. 

Earlier in the day the postman had delivered the playmat for Tiny Epic Western. So naturally I wanted to take the mat out for a spin.

So with our Mexican stand off set up on the playmat it was time to admire it.

This is a massive playmat. 


But a lovely one, that not only really captures the poker element of the game in its colouring trying to evoke the baize of a poker table. It actually captures the feel with a baize like feel! What a great use of texture.

Gamelyn games make some really nice playmats for their Tiny Epic games. However they do take the games away from the Tiny ethos. 

In our Mexican stand off Ben was quickest on the draw and won. 

A great evening gaming once again! Some nice banter, great company. All finished off with the now traditional dodgy meat fest.

Fenland Gamers Oct 16 Meetup

Fenland Gamers, game night, Uncategorized

Last night saw the October meet up of the  Fenland Gamers at the White Lion Hotel. This was a first for the monthly Meetup.

Our first game of the evening was Keyflower. 

Part worker placement, part bidding. It’s a nice challenging game. 

You have to decide whether to use a tile for its ability or to try and bid on it to get ownership.

There is an advantage to owning the tiles. Points for starters, plus it may increase the number of workers the next round that you have to play with. Because if another player uses on of your tiles you get those meeples at the end of the round. 

You also get to bid for choosing bonuses at the end of the round. Get a chance using tile abilities to gather resources that you can use to upgrade a tile. 

It can be tough making that decision what to do. 

The art isn’t amazing, but has a nice cartoony feel to it. I do like the player screens that are used to hide your meeples from the other players. 

Despite loosing to Deigo it liked the game a lot.

We finished off the evening with Isle of Trains.

I’d nearly bought this game at the expo. Which is a shame as I liked playing this also. And it won’t be long before it ends up in the collection.

I love the multi use cards. Using them to pay for cards, to use them as carriages/trains or as a resource to activate an ability. 

That activating of an ability is genius. Because that only happens when you put a resource on an opponents carriage. But if you do that you are helping them get nearer to completing their contract. If you do it on your own train, nothing happens, but you do have the goods to use for completing a contract. That’s an interesting decision to have to make. How badly do you need the ability to meet your goals? 

The records will show that I won this game.

A great evening of gaming. Looking forward to Friday now for the next lot.

Wait this had no title!

Fenland Gamers, game night

I have to admire Jonathan it takes a lot of balls to build the Nantucket wing on his house.

Last night I’d hesitate to say we played the game Western Front. We tried it is the best I can describe it as.

I’m not going to waste more time on this game at the moment. When the best you can say about the game is you like the linen finish of the cards. It says it all really.

We followed up with Karmaka, a game I knew the theme would not appeal to Jonathan. However I thought he might like the mechanics and art.

I called it right, Jonathan beat me whilst not disliking the mechanics, but not enjoying the theme.

Our final game was a two player Tiny Epic Western. Which was an ok experience but much better with more players.

Luckily for me I won. Which ended our gaming evening and despite the false start a pleasant evening of gaming.

The Iron Throne Round Two

Fenland Gamers, game night, game of thrones

Our skirmish over the Iron Throne seemed so long ago. But the memory of the other houses betrayal still stung with how they gave the Iron Throne to Jeff the Baratheon. 

Mid week once I knew how many could still make our planned fight club for the Iron Throne, I ordered the A Feast of Crows expansion for the game. 

This was my clever plan to gain the Throne. A Feast of Crows is a four player only expansion that replaces the win condition for the game, introduces a new house, House Arryn, objectives, a new setup. 

During setup I drew the Starks, Jeff got House Arryn, Jonathan House Lannister, and Diego House Baratheon.

Looking back on our game my tactical error on turn one that I missed until too late, of attacking House Arryn instead of the Lannisters, helped towards giving Jonathan his well deserved victory. If I had gone after the Lannisters I would have completed my special objective for my house and started racking up victory points, while denying Jonathan and his Lannisters 

The others helped towards his victory also by not taking him on, on their side of Westeros.

I liked this expansion a lot. The house specific objectives, the objective deck. Such a great idea. Completing them is the only way to earn victory points. It forces you to be aggressive. You can’t afford to turtle. 

It was a quick game, four turns! Not including setup time, our playtime was about an hour and a half. 

Setup especially contributes to the forced aggression, effectively shutting down the southern part of Westeros. You are also starting off with more developed forces if my poor memory of our first game isn’t playing tricks on me.

This is definitely my preferred way to play with four players now. I’ll happily play the original way. But this expansion for me is a far better playing experience. 

There is a six player only expansion also, which if we get a six player game together I will definitely get. I do wonder why there isn’t a five player expansion. 

The postman bought my Kickstarter copy of Tiny Epic Western Deluxe Edition yesterday morning. So after sleeving the player boards the game along with Bang the Dice Game and it’s first expansion Old Saloon were put in my game bag along with A Game of Thrones the boardgame.

Having seen Jeff usurped from the Iron Throne, only to see Jonathan placed on the throne instead. It was time to hit the old west and play Tiny Epic Western.

Naturally with the game being so new, none of us knew the rules. So this was a learning game, reading the rules as we played! 

Within a turn of playing I think we had the majority of the rules down. 

So we have an area control, worker placement, set collection, variable player powers game with a poker element too!

Yep there’s a lot of boxes being ticked here. But it works.

I like the duelling, although I think I only duelled once! It’s a cool way to resolve control of a space on the board.

Having player aids on the back of the character boards is a good use of real estate. Which means unused boards instantly become player aids. 

I loved the poker element of the game. It was rare I wasn’t with a five value card. So rare if I was wearing a long sleeved top the others would be rolling up my sleeves checking for cards.

The unique player boards with their player abilities is a nice touch. The four we were playing with didn’t seem over powered. 

Being the Kickstarter deluxe edition we had extra bullet dice, one in each players colour. But the whole overall component quality was good. We also got a plastic wanted card with a see through window. Which looked better to me than the standard included card.

I liked the wanted card as it encouraged duels. Ownership went to the winner of the last duel. It gives a bonus if you have it on phase three of the game, and if you have it at the end of the game two victory points. 

We did find the rule book a bit confusing in places. It was handy having a mini FAQ inside the box.

The only thing I regret is not buying the optional playing mat. But I’ll correct that soon.

Tiny Epic Westerns is a nice game. I like it, and definitely can see it coming to the table again. And I’m not saying that because I won!

So is this the best Tiny Epic game? Does it beat Tiny Epic Galaxies? 

For me I think TEG is still the best Tiny Epic game. But this easily takes second spot.

A great day gaming. Plus we pigged out on Krispy Creme donuts!