So last night I got to play some games with Diego. Ben wasn’t able to make it, so no Dune Imperium Uprising. But I have started a cunning plan to get the game to the table. Which is basically creating an event to play the game on the clubs discord server at the start of March. Why then? Part 2 of the Denis Villeneuve take on the Dune books comes out at the cinema that weekend. We’ll see if there are any takers.

Our first game of the evening saw the return of the push your luck dice game Zombie Dice. Which we played with Diego’s daughter. It’s been a long long time since I last got the game to the table. According to the bgstat app 6 years and 11 months.

We followed up with one of his daughter’s favourite games about dragons and jewels. I didn’t record this game in the bgstat app. But I won. Making up for Diego’s two Zombie Dice victories.

Once Diego’s daughter had gone to bed we played Parks with the first expansion Nightfall.

Nightfall adds “…new Park Cards featuring new rewards and all new artwork from the Fifty-Nine Parks Print Series, including the 17 parks not represented in the base game. … new Year Cards and Bonus Scoring opportunities, and … new Camping mechanic.”

What I like about the expansion is more parks (more cards is always cool) and new mechanics that don’t add to the overhead of playing the game. But do add to the choices you have to make.

In this game the camera was a much more fought over item, swapping possession several times.

The new year cards with the end game scoring were a big improvement. My initial card gave me 2 points for every 3 resources I had at the end of the game. These worked so much better than the core games year cards.

Loved the camp sites. Some great abilities that I really wanted to activate. Particularly the ones that gave me lots of resources.

In the end after our year of hiking I managed to get the victory by a point.

Our final game of the evening was Sea Salt and Paper.

When this game first arrived I was taken aback by the diminutive size of the box. It is so tiny. It is pocket size. No chance of sleeving these cards unless you rehome them.

The cards in this game look beautiful.

Plus once you get used to the iconography you can start to really enjoy the simplicity of the game play. It really is an enjoyable card game.

As the photo below shows Diego won this game. I do like it when a game has a social media winners card.

My first gaming of the new year took place Friday. It was meant to be Wednesday but a monkey wrench was thrown into that plan. Such as the community centre not being open when Dave and I got there!

But five of us met up last night to play some games. Between us we had enough games to choose from that would outnumber an average persons game collection.

After some catching up it was time to choose a game to play.

Jonathan wanted to try Cascadia and it was a game I was interested in trying to.

There was such a great gaming moment when Charlene cost herself 24 points by joining her two groups of bears together to make a single one. It was a classic moment of “oh shit, why did I do that?”

I have to admit this was a nice drafting game. Not the heaviest of games. I like the variety of scoring cards that influence what you draft during the game on the animal side. Plus you have other means of getting points based on the terrain tiles. It gives some variety in the tactics and the way to get points.

Ben took the honours.

After Jonathan left we had a game of Stich fur Stich.

It’s a weird combo of mechanics. Think deduction with trick taking!

A player randomly chooses a character and a weapon who did the crime (?) from their set of tiles. This pairing secretly decides trumps for that round.

The players then play a card from their hand. The person that chose the tiles then declares who won the trick, but not why. The other players then try and work out what the two trump tiles are.

The other players then secretly select the tiles they think are trumps, show them to the person who knows and they say yes or no if the guess was right.

The trick taking repeats until all cards are played.

I scoring for the player who chose the trumps is based on how long it takes the others to all guess the trumps plus the tricks taken. Whilst the other players score on the number of cards in hand when they guess correctly and tricks won.

It took a round or two to warm to the game. Especially when Charlene “broke” the game on the first couple of tries by guessing right first time!

I’d be interesting to see what Jonathan thinks of the game. He does like deduction games.

Charterstone Saturday

Saturday saw games three and four of the Charterstone campaign finally happen.

There had been a long pause since starting it due to diary conflict!

Somehow I won a game! I think it’s my first win even taking into account the aborted campaign I played a couple years back.

It really is interesting to see stuff we never saw in the aborted campaign. So there is still moments of mystery for us who took part in that previous campaign.

At the end of the second game we did set a date for the next session.

We finished off with FTW!

Another new card game from Ben’s collection. He does have a knack for finding interesting and fun filler card games.

It was enjoyable. An interesting combo of keeping your highest value card and trying to get rid of the rest of your hand. At the end of the round you score your highest value card in hand minus the total of your remaining cards in hand.

Two great days of gaming. And a great way to start off the new year.

Tuesday I got to do some overtime during the afternoon. But I was finished in time to be able to play some Vampire the Masquerade Rivals with Diego.

I had none of my Rivals stuff with me. So was reliant on Diego providing everything. For this session we used the Justice & Mercy expansion that Diego had for the game.

This expansion has the Banu Haqim and Salubri clans. Our first game had Diego playing Banu Haqim, and myself Salubri.

Salubri is an interesting clan to play out of the box. For starters you get an agenda point at the start of each turn. So already the game starts with a 13 turn timer. Add in an attachment that allows you to tap your vampire for an agenda point that timer gets shorter.

Next interesting thing and probably more so than the first, is the fact Salubri can only have one vamp out at a time! When that vamp gets taken out you don’t loose the game, you get a chance to play one from hand first.

It’s actually a fun clan to play. I could see myself building a deck around this clan.

After Diego narrowly won we swapped decks.

Banu Haqim is a rituals deck with diablerie thrown in. Sadly for me, unlike Diego in the first game, I didn’t draw the ritual that allowed me to steal agenda points.

Which meant I wasn’t able to slow that 13 turn timer, or take out enough Salubri. So Diego got a second win.

I think this is the first Rivals expansion where both clans have been fun to play. I’ll have to get this expansion.

Wednesday saw me round Ben’s to play Apiary with him and Charlene.

Once again I lost. But my score was improved. I even got to the end of the Queen’s Favour track.

I still had a blast playing the game. I love that whilst playing you feel like you are doing cool stuff.

Our second game of the evening was First in Flight. A game about the early days of powered flight.

This has a cool mixture of mechanics. There is deck building and push your luck, a rondel with turn order. The later working similar to Tokaido or Glen More.

I love games that have asymmetrical variable player powers. And I played into mine of getting to look at extra cards whilst looking at cards from your deck to great affect.

In our game I was allowed to get several trick cards that allowed me to look at the top of my card and manipulate card order. Which allowed me on my final flight to get a winning distance of 48.

That final flight was funny because Ben had been getting all these powerful cards to improve his distance, had a more powerful descent card, and had mentioned this more than once during the game.

Sadly as you can see in the gallery above his final flight was very disappointing and very very funny.

I enjoyed First in Flight.

So Wednesday was a great evening of gaming.

The post title?

Back in my teenage years Iron Maiden released a single Flight of Icarus.

I was reading the heavy metal magazine Kerrang! at the time. Naturally they reviewed the single and there was one line that has stuck with me all these years later.

Which I thought would be appropriate for a post where I talked about playing a board game about man’s early attempts at powered flight.