Category Archives: game night

game night

Yes Yes Yes

Fenland Gamers, game night

Last night was the monthly meet up of the Fenland Gamers gaming group in Wisbech (Capital of the Fens, Centre of the Universe).

Our first game of the evening was a five player game of Istanbul. We were playing the base game with the kebab shop promo. Which replaces the water fountain tile, which as popular opinion and I agree on is the better of the two tiles to use. It doesn't just allow you to recall your assistants but gives you an alternative action to do instead of paying two coins to send your criminal relative to another tile on the board to do the action of that tile.

For our game we used the random tile setup, instead of the short or long routes setups. Jonathan has his little game plan for the short route setup that scores him gems very easily using just three tiles that are close together. I wasn't sure if he had a similar plan for the long route setup. But I wasn't going to risk it. Neutralise the plans with randomness. See before the game had even had its first turn, the game had started in the setup!

Luck was on my side in this game, and I took an early lead in collecting three of the five gems that I needed, while the rest struggled to get enough goods together to collect one. I'd hit on a nice little engine, that allowed me to recycle a bonus card to get me the resources I needed to go buy the gems.

Katie did interrupt that flow by buying one of the gems pushing up the cost of my next one. But I'd got four gems this way before it was no longer a viable scoring option for me. I needed one more gem to win. The others had started scoring gems, Jonathan was starting to get close.

But I had a plan.

If I could gather sixteen coins I could buy my final gem from another tile. The others hadn't spotted what I was doing. They had hardly any money each, so none of them was going to be threatening to ruin my scoring opportunity.

I had a bonus card that allowed me to move three or four tiles instead of two. Then a five coin bonus card was left on the tile that allows me to grab a bonus card. No one took it. I got to the tile grabbed the bonus card, checked my math, I had the sixteen coins needed to buy the winning gem.

My next turn would be my winning move, despite the tile I needed to get to being three tiles away. I had that nice bonus card that allowed me to get there in one move and win.

Wow I'd won my first game of Istanbul ever. Ok I've only played it a couple of times previously, but despite loving the game I'd lost them.

Next up after my glorious victory, was a four player game of WWE Superstar Showdown. I sat this one out, although it's a game I want to play (well I do own it). My contribution to the game was ref! And just like the real thing, not an impartial ref.

It was boys against girls. Gavin and Jonthan had drafted Big E and the apex predator Randy Orton. While the Katie and Jo had John Cena and Daniel Bryant.

The figures representing the wrestlers are quite good, and a nice size. Although the game supports upto four players, I think from my observation the game is more suited as a two player game.

The “rock, paper, scissors” mechanic when simultaneously revealing cards, and the pre-programming of your moves by selecting the three cards you want to play, works well I think for this game.

I think thematically loosing cards from the deck mimics a wrestler getting weaker, more tired as the match goes on really well.

As Jonathan pointed out the iconography on the cards takes a little getting used to. Luckily there are some handy reference guides on the board itself.

I'd love them to release an expansion for the game of some classic wrestlers like my favourite Stone Cold Steve Austin, or The Undertaker. Maybe add more event types.

In the meantime this is one I'll play with Nath (he's a wrestling fan, or was). I think it helps if you are a fan of wrestling to get the most out of this game. It does seem to capture the theme well. What I observed hasn't put me off the game. It won't go down as a great game. But it will be one of those fun, light games I think. But proof of this will be when I play it with Nath and see what he thinks.

 

Runners and Wonders

chatteris warlords, game night, netrunner

Last night was the weekly Chatteris Warlords meet up.

As usual there was some Bolt Action action going on along with some Early Napoleononic war gaming.

But for me I had some business to do. Firstly I had a Colt Express Time Machine promo to deliver. Followed by picking up some stuff. If you stork me on Instagram you will know what one of the items was, otherwise you'll have to wait until Saturday's post. Oh what a tease I am.

Tuesday's are now my Weekly Netrunner fix. This week I was playing Ben again. Our first game was my Noise against his Corp (I think PE). I took an early four point lead with two agendas hitting an unguarded R&D and Archives, which Ben replied to by scoring an agenda back, and icing up R&D.

The unguarded Archives allowed me to build up Datasucker, and Incubator, while running the odd Retrieval Run. Trying to slow my plans down, Ben would occasionally purge virus counters.

I got Medium out I had five virus counters sitting on Incubator. I had enough credits to install and trash DDOS, and DDOS was sitting in my grip. There were also four virus counters on Datasucker. Sitting between me and hitting R&D for a nice five card draw, was a single unrezed piece of ice. I was crossing my fingers Ben wasn't going to purge virus counters. If he did that was going to ruin my next turn.

Ben's turn happened, I still had my virus counters in place. Time to execute my plan. I trashed Incubator putting the virus counters on Medium. Installed DDOS and trashed it. Then ran on R&D. The Corp was unable to stop me. First card drawn an agenda worth three points and giving me the win.

Our second game my NEH was up against Ben's Noise.

Ben scored an early two point agenda from my HQ, to which I replied scoring my only single point agenda 15 minutes. Which I was hoping he would score so I could pull it back into R&D.

I landed a couple of tags, which with Ben hitting a snare and me hitting him with a traffic accident, reduce Ben to zero cards in his grip.

Sadly I wasn't able to finish the job off and murder him. But it did slow Ben's plans down. Ben quickly removed the tags.

We sparred away, trying to gain momentum for our plans. I drew two scorched earths. I just needed to land a tag. Oh and have enough credits to play them both. I had enough to play one, but it would be two turns before I could land the second. There was a good chance Ben would not have rebuilt his grip enough for me to murder him with the second scorched earth.

Ben ran on R&D gaining a tag. BOOM! First scorched earth landed. Oh wait Ben had only three cards in his grip! I'd killed him. Woot! Two for two tonight.

My final game of the evening was taking part in a seven player game of 7 Wonders.

It was interesting playing the game with this many players. Not sure if I like it more than a four player game.

To cut a potentially long story short, I came second from last.

Another enjoyable evening gaming. Followed by the monthly Fenland Gamer meetup tonight ^__^

 

Man v Demons

Fenland Gamers, game night

While Debbie is off answering the lure of grease paint and treading the boards reprising her off off off Westend Olivier Award winning performance of third tree from the left, the rest of our pandemic fighting group had to find our own entertainment for last night.

Sadly Matt was unable to make it, leaving Jonathan and myself to duke it out over the tabletop field of cardboard.

Our first game of the evening was Discoveries. A game Jonathan had been wanting to try.

During our game I was snapping up the tribes cards, especially after I got one early that allowed me to ignore whether the tribe was a friendly or hostile tribe. What I had forgotten was the points are awarded for the tepees based on who has the most, and not for the actual number you have. Which gave me a six point advantage instead of a twelve point one.

Damn that was a big miscalculation. One that cost me the game. Jonathan did better on the set collection than me, and edged the points scored on completed explorations also. So the six point advantage I got on the tepees was not enough to swing the game in my favour.

I think when the worst thing you can say about a game are comments about how the dice feel too light, or they should have included the score pad, then the game has to be good. And it is an enjoyable game. Is it a great game? No. But definitely one that will see more play. I have to try it with more players, who knows the whole game may change and become great.

Our second game of the evening was Battlelore Second Edition.

I was playing the Uthuk Army, while Jonathan played the Daqan Army.

One of the nice touches over Memoir '44 is the mustering of your army. This is basically building your army from the forces available to you before combat. This was our first play so we went for the other nice touch of using one of the predefined armies provided for the game. The ones we chose are shown below.

I chose mine because I wanted to play with a big monster! While Jonthan chose his because he thought a smaller army would be easier to command while learning the game.

The great thing about Battlelore is having the setup being part of the game. Which means Jonathan and I get to choose a scenario for our half of the board.

These scenarios decide victory point scoring, and extras like getting lore points. They also decide first player!

Scenario with the lowest starting letter goes first. Which meant Jonathan was going first.

Then after setting up the board according to the scenarios chosen, it's time to place your forces on the board. And here is another great little touch. You place cards representing the units face down, along with dummy cards to disguise where your forces are. Then once all placed, both players turn the cards over and place the figures for their forces on the board.

Draw your starting hand of command cards and lore cards, and let battle commence.

Before starting I thought we might struggle to get enough lore to play lore cards, especially the higher cost ones. However that was not to be the case.

I made one tactical mistake right from the start. I thought I'd camp my Chaos Lord on my building to get the two lore tokens each go. However what I hadn't read before positioning near to the building was it can't occupy a building hex. Doh!

Destroying units doesn't earn victory points in Battlelore, as they do in Memoir '44. However occupying banner hexes at the end of your turn do. During the early game Jonathan was scoring two victory points each turn and taking an early lead on that front. The best I could achieve was a single point. But I was getting plenty of lore. So I thought my best avenue was to eradicate Jonathan's forces from the board, the second win condition.

I managed to stop Jonathan's victory point engine, and make good use of my lore cards. Occupying both banner hexes I had started getting two victory points each turn. Jonathan eventually started scoring victory points again. It was going to be a race for a victory point win. A smite the enemy from the face of the board was still on for me. But before that would happen one of us would have reached the required sixteen victory points.

My victory was a close win. If I hadn't won that turn, Jonathan would have won on his. It was that close.

Jonathan had been getting frustrated with his forces. The army was too light for going against mine. With the archers acting like artillery in Memoir, it didn't help that Jonathan was rolling badly! Which isn't helped with only one face on the die being the hit for archers. He wasn't much of a fan of the lore cards. I on the other hand was, I'd been using mine more effectively. I had even called a swarm to block line of sight on my units, stopping an attack.

I like Battlelore, it's your Memoir fix when you want a fantasy setting. There are some great touches to the game. Definitely one to get back to the table, and add to its armies.

 

A mid week father son gaming day

father son gaming, game night, news, star realms

I'm down visiting Natha at the moment. I had to come down to make sure he got to the dentist. Let's just say that his track record of attending has been poor. So yesterday he went to his second appointment to sort out some tooth ache he'd had a couple of weeks back. Which resulted in the pain inducing tooth being extracted! So even more pain for Nath.

We followed the dentist visit up with a trip to the Farnborough cinema to see Deadpool (such a great movie) and London Has Fallen (an average at best sequel). This is something that I haven't done in a long time, back to back movies. Between films we grabbed a quick guilt loaded bite to eat at McDonalds.

But that was our Tuesday. What about today though?

Well once Nath was up, and I had fed him breakfast (American pancakes) we played our first game of the day Eminent Domain. A game I have been wanting to get to the table since getting it second hand off Facebook.

I liked playing Eminent Domain a lot. The game did not disappoint. Setup was fairly easy, and quick. Always good. I like the turn structure a lot. It's simple, but does the job. At the start of your turn, you can play a card from your hand if you wish to perform its action. You then have to select a role from the middle and play that role ability. This builds up your deck, allows you to get resources for the path you are following, explore planets, research new technologies. The other players also have the option of also following that role or dissenting (which is basically draw a card from your draw pile).

Finally the turn is ended with a tidy up phase for the current player where played cards go on the discard pile, a player can discard unwanted cards in their hand, and finally draw back up to five cards.

I ended up taking an explore colonise path, while Nath went down the more aggressive war route and conquered his planets.

Neither of us tried the produce/trade route, and Nath was the only one out of the two of us who did any research to get those more advanced technology cards for the deck.

There is very little interaction between players, but you are still involved between turns, trying to work out whether following the others role phase is useful in advancing your own goals, or is it better to draw that extra card?

I ended up beating Nath 39 victory points to 27.

Next up was what must be Nath's favourite card game or even modern board game, Star Realms.

It felt like we were playing with everything plus the kitchen sink in the cards we were using. Base game, Gambits, Crisis (minus heroes cards), Colony Wars, plus Cosmic Gambits. That's a hell of a lot of cards. We had the draw deck for the trade row split into three piles.

There was

In the end having done superior scrapping to give him the edge he needed, Nath delivered the killing blow of 21 points of damage to remove my 19 points of authority.

Our final game of the afternoon was Discoveries. This game is on my list of ones to try and play this first quarter of the year.

Once again a very quick game to setup. There was a bit more referring to the rules for our play of this compared to Eminent Domain.

However once you get used to the turn structure this is a nice little dice allocation game. The part of American history this is set in is neither here or there for me. The look of the game is nice, and subdued. They have gone with wooden dice for the game, that do feel “light”, but look and fit in with the theming.

Once again there is very little interaction between players. Being limited to the grabbing of your dice back from another player, or grabbing a grey tribe dice from the player with the most of them. Between turns you are mainly planning how best to utilise the dice you have available to achieve your goal.

As I said I liked the game, it will be interesting to see how this plays with three or four players. Will it feel different?

Oh and as the score pad shows I won ^__^

Finally some news!

Coming soon to a Kickstarter near you I believe (can't remember where I saw this Kickstarter reference) from Albino Dragon is The Goonies Adventure Card Game. Once I know more details I'll post them.

When I mentioned to Nath about this, all I got was “what is The Goonies?” He hasn't seen the movie!!! I never thought I'd fall into that group of bad parenting that also includes having not shown their kids Star Wars, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones. How did this happen? I've made a point of making sure Nath has seen the modern classics.

I'm going to have to rectify this ASAP.

 

Pandemic Legacy May

Fenland Gamers, game night, pandemic legacy season 1

“I've got sunshine on a cloudy day.

When it's cold outside I've got the month of May.“

My Girl

 

One day I may get bored with writing this intro warning you that the following post may or may not contain spoilers for the game Pandemic Legacy, and just go straight into the post with no warning. But in the meantime if you are trying to avoid spoilers for the game then you may just want to leave and join me in my next post.

1…

2…

3…

Right if you are still here you really can't complain if I spoil the game for you.

Last night saw the usual suspects of Debbie, Matt, Jonathan and myself meeting up to tackle the month of May in Pandemic Legacy Season 1.

Because of our success in April we were now down to two funded events to shuffle into the players deck. Our staples of one quiet night and the one that allows us to rearrange the top six cards of the infection deck were our choices. How we would cope without these two I don't know. We also still had our unfunded events in the players decks (the dual use city cards) to fall back on if need be.

Our briefing gave us the task of completing three objectives out of the four available. We chose our starting base, and which city to remove a faded figure from. COdA had mutated again, so when we drew a red city card from the players deck this to would cause that city to be infected with one of the faded, but if it would cause an outbreak nothing would happen.

We thought we were doing well, no Cleggmidia had come out, we had cured and eradicated C-Thatcam-Major (one objective complete), working on curing Sithite. Then the Cleggmidia cards started hitting, as did the epidemic cards. Joburge had fallen completely, pandemics were spreading like wildfire.

Our group decided maybe we could build the six garrisons quicker than trying to get the third cure. But before we could implement the plan, we had lost, over run by the pandemics.

We had failed, so quickly it took us by surprise at how fast we had lost this one. The defeat had seemed to come from nowhere.

After a brief team conflab, we chose our four funded events. I still love this mechanic. Do well you get less funded events, do badly you get more. Just like real life!

Our plan was to fore go finding three cures but to instead build the six garrisons, have seven quarantined cities, and eradicate one disease. That seemed do able. We could even build road blocks now to stop the spread of the faded and the curable diseases.

Like the previous game the wrong unfunded events were landing with Matt and Debbie. If one quite night, or the two extra actions had been with Jonathan or myself we could keep re-using them as long as we had the city cards. We've used this ability of ours to great effect in previous games.

Still, we had cured one disease, built five garrisons and the seven quarantines would not be a problem. But once more epidemics snowballing into pandemics cost of us the game. Much to the relief of Matt who wanted to get back to watch the latest episode of the new X-Files. In fact he was willing on the cards when an epidemic broke to cause the pandemics.

That was May. We did much better the second time around, there was definitely light at the end of the tunnel, the finishing line was in sight, and any other cliche saying you can think of.

This was definitely a “wait! What just happened?” Month.

Due to the lure of the stage lights and grease paint calling to Debbie we will not be playing June next week. So a week off from the spoilers for you all.

We get six funded events in June ^___^

 

So near but so far

Fenland Gamers, game night, play test

Last night saw Jonathan and I patrol once more the Streets of Commonville.

It was going to be a weird play session, there had been some “requests” made to Jonathan from some of the small but elite folks that had viewed the previous play through.

Once more we were filming the play through, but we had a wishlist of things to cover.

The first twenty minutes or so of filming was spent explaining various elements of the game. We then started a two player game.

I thought for the sake of this recording we would be taking a couple of turns and then “fast forwarding” the game state to show various in game situations.

However we were opening the board up fairly fast. A lot faster than our other two player game together.

I was soon able to level up to Captain, giving me five dice and an intuition (alter a dice to a value I need), plus my starting donut. It wasn't long before we were also able to get Jonathan up to the same rank, with similar additional powers.

But the clock was ticking. We hadn't revealed all the evidence, but we had done enough to get down to one suspect (shockingly not Dr Kinky this time), give that suspect a weapon and a set of handcuffs.

With the clock dangerously low, we had one turn to get myself to join Jonathan (who arrived the previous turn) and the suspect and defeat the suspect.

I needed three dice to get me to the suspects tile. Then we needed to score between us forty five points with our remaining dice. We totalled up our points, we had forty four points. Short by one! One lousy point!

The game had beat us. But that was the closest game we'd played. Amazingly close. Great fun.

So some editing for me, then the “directors commentary” to record and then edit back into the video, before putting up for viewing. How I ended up doing more work I don't know. All I know at the moment with the size font that will be needed in the rules book for my name in the thanks, the page will have to be a gatefold!

How many servers?

chatteris warlords, game night, netrunner

Last night was the weekly Chatteris Warlords meet. Or as I like to call it my weekly Netrunner fix.

The evening started off with a four player game of 7 Wonders. This would technically be my second play of the game ever, despite getting the game straight after my first play. So naturally I was asking questions to refresh my poor memory.

So despite my lack of experience in playing the card drafting game 7 Wonders I think coming second was rather good.

Then it was time to do some running against the corps. It was Darren v Ben. Our first game was my NEH deck verses Ben's Noise.

Ben was scoring agendas and soon hit six agenda points. During that time I was landing tags with my ice rather easily. Which made landing my drawn Scorched Earth easy. I needed to find my other Scorched Earth, Traffic Accident, find and score my Private Security Force, or hope Ben hit a snare.

As you can see I created a few servers trying to find a card that would allow me to finish off the runner. While I was doing this I was reminded of Timmy Wong and his server spawning at last years Worlds. There were four agendas hidden amongst them. But I had given up on the scoring agendas route to victory. I was going for the murder, there were plenty of tags landed, Ben still was within easy reach of that goal.

It really was a race, Ben to score that final agenda, and myself finding that damage to kill him. Sadly it was a race I was to loose. A great enjoyable game. I learnt a lot about my deck in this game.

Second game was my Noise against Ben's Personal Evolution.

Within three turns I had Pancakes/Wyldside installed. I'd got Same Old Thing down, plus Aesop's. My rig was building up nicely. Datasucker was out and building up with virus counters, thanks to an unprotected archives. My bookmarks and Streetpeddlers were doing there jobs of storing cards for me. Inject was getting cards in hand and getting me cash.

I quickly scored some agendas, Ben scored one back. I needed one agenda to win. Ben built a scoring server three ice deep. He hid a possible agenda behind it, and advanced it twice. It was run now or, well there was no other pressure at this point.

I had David install, Faust, and trashed my installed DDOS. All of sudden the ice wall was thinner, and I was ready to run hard on the server. So unable to rez the first bit of ice, the second was my first encounter. It was rez'd Faust ate it up. The third and final piece of ice had a strength of five. David territory. David ripped that ice to pieces. I was through. Had I been duped? Was this a trap?

Nope, it was my winning agenda. The evening ended up even.

How do you follow that sort of exciting game play? With a game of Catan of course.

I'm not going to bore you (well more than I already have). But Ben totally ruled this game, and got the win easily.

A great evening gaming.

Pandemic Legacy April

Fenland Gamers, game night, pandemic legacy season 1

Aren't you tired of reading this first bit yet? Obviously not… The following post may or may not (OK most definitely does this week) contain spoilers for the game Pandemic Legacy. If you don't want to read the spoilers and keep the surprises for when you play, then this most certainly isn't the post for you. If that is the case see you in the next post.

Still here?

Ok let's talk April…

After being victorious last week the funding organisation rewarded us for our success by cutting our funding!

After reading our mission brief, which was the same as March's we chose our four funded events we would be playing with.

We had lost our previous starting bonus of being able to place a starting quarantine marker anywhere on the board. But we gained being able to place a garrison anywhere on the board instead. So Shanghai became our first garrison of the game, deep in COdA-403c country, with a character upgrade done to Matts character Zardoz once at the garrison he can chuck out quarantine tokens to the connected cities.

The briefing also told us to place a reminder on the third epidemic spot. Which when reached meant turning over some more cards on the legacy deck.

Our plan was to have Matt in COdA country quarantining the cities, and making use of the garrison and his upgrade, while the rest of us fought the other outbreaks and find cures.

We got the unnamed yellow disease cured, and eradicated early. But success was quickly followed by two epidemic cards. We hit that reminder token and now had to see what was being thrown at us next.

We hit an Alert, COdA was mutating!!!! There were also a lot of tabs to open. We were in for a rough ride. New stickers were being added to the rule book to cover the faded and how they are handled. Plus new stickers to mark the board with when a city becomes faded. And then…

OMG the faded victims of COdA are amazing!!! Little translucent green figures to add to the board. As Jonathan said the game is worth getting just for these alone.

All of a sudden a game about fighting disease and curing them, has turned into a zombie game!!! Ok they don't call them zombies but the faded. But they look like little zombies. This is AWESOME!

We soon after cured and eradicated Sithite (Matt), and with the player deck dwindling fast we got found a cure for C-Thatcam-Major (Debbie).

We had won against the odds! Our first upgrade chosen was to make Shanghai a starting garrison, and we also took the new unfunded event.

Finally we had to name the unnamed yellow disease, since we eradicated it. Which was given the name of Cleggmidia.

With two funded events for May, the odds are stacking up against us of succeeding. Bring the onslaught on…

The Dark Knight Patrols The Streets of Commonville

Fenland Gamers, game night, play test
Last night saw a three player play test of The Streets of Commonville. Jo, Jonathan and myself donned our suits of blue and shields and once more pounded the pavement, uncovered evidence and “questioned” suspects to capture the wrong doer.
There had been some tweaks to the game for tonight's playtest. Some graphical like the addition of the cctv camera on the arrow counters to make them a bit more thematic. The player boards now had you controlling the upgrade from a choice of three, donuts (ability to pass a dice to another player, or reroll), another dice, or the ability to alter the value of a dice known as intuition.
Before play Jonathan made a quick adjustment to a dice that swapped the ability to get two minutes of time back to the ability of swapping an ability on your player board with one in the precinct. I did disagree with Jonathan on this, it meant the dice would give you that ability 50% of the time, and no way to get time back.
Below photo property of Jonathan
This was Jo's first time playing the game, and after a brief intro to the basics of the game, we were off fighting crime, fitting up innocent people, and eating our way through a tonne of donuts.
Early on in the game the Jonathan suspect token hit the board. It wasn't long before we were fitting him up with handcuffs and transferring him into his alter ego Dr Kinky.
Below Batman captures Dr Kinky.

The game still took an hour and half to play, and like previous play throughs didn't seem that long. That's the surprise of the game. There is virtually no down time, everyone is involved through out the game. I've pointed this out before in previous posts on the game, this fact alone I think is a big big positive of the game.

Another great play through.

 

Running Tuesday

chatteris warlords, game night, netrunner, Road to regionals

So my new improved Noise deck, got owned by Jamie and his NEH deck. Not sure I was playing “pancakes” right. Once Wyldside got trashed, does “pancakes” give me an extra click? (Done a check and no it doesn't, curses!) Our next match up this week will see my NEH deck take on which ever runner Jamie is currently playing.

In the evening once more I was at the Chatteris Warlords meetup.

There was a real variety of games being played last night. 7 Wonders was being played by Jonathan's children and friends along with a couple of members of the club. Later on there was a game of Betrayal At The House On The Hill, another table a game of 7 Wonders: Duels was going (the cards were smaller than I expected, we are talking around the same size as the damage cards in X-Wing, which is a popular size, just not your normal playing card size. Yet for a small box, and cards this game requires a lot of table space).

A game of Bolt Action was going on also. I enjoy what would at best be described as war game, miniatures lite, so games like Memoir '44, X-Wing, Battlelore. The more heavy games aren't for me. I don't want to be using a tape measure to move. The nearest I get is that little movement template you get in games like X-Wing. That's my limit. Plus a game of Wings of Glory was on the go.

My gaming last night at the club was two games of Netrunner, surprise, surprise.

First up my Noise deck against Jinteki Chronos Protocol. First blood went to my opponent scoring from an unprotected server he had setup on his first turn.

That was a good bluff, I had underestimated my opponent. I didn't think they would install an unprotected agenda.

After that I started scoring. My opponent was getting easier to read where he had installed agendas. With Faust and David out, parasite in my grip, incubator breeding nicely, the odds were in my favour. Archives had been left unprotected which I was able to use to great effect. Sadly all my runs on HQ were unproductive. But my runs on R&D and the remote servers were good feeding grounds. DDOS did its job nicely, and having two Same Old Things installed helped my recycle the Levy and I've Had Worse To great effect.

Round two saw my NEH deck up against Kate. Within two turns I had a Traffic Accident in my hand. I just needed to start landing some tags. I was iced up, set some traps that could be advanced. Although my opponent managed to avoid one with a Infiltration. The one he did trigger I was one advancement token short of the desired effect I wanted.

With City Surveillance installed the drip drip drain of the runners credits started, it was that or take a tag. Once I landed a tag (which I think I did with a ghost branch) that was it, the gateway was open. Our agenda scoring was back and fourth, we were pretty even. The Franchise City hit like a dream when the runner scored an agenda.

I scored a Chronos Project too early for my liking, but still took out some cards from the runners heap from the game.

I had hidden an agenda in archives, well I had to, there was no other option. My archives was unprotected, and there was no way I was going to ice it up to protect it. That would have been like putting a great big sign up saying “hey look at me, something valuable is here”.

The runner did a run on my City Surveillance, and trashed it. Which was nice because that was a costly run for them and left them short of credits. How did I follow that up on my turn? I installed another City Surveillance!!

Agenda wise we were even, the runner decided to stop avoiding tags, and got upto four tags. I checked how many cards they had in hand. Then I drew a Scorched Earth. Click one, played Traffic Accident, two meat damage. Click two, played Scorched Earth, four meat damage, for the kill and the win.

I was happier with the way this NEH deck had worked. It's still not there. But it needs more play now.

Tuesday I'm calling the start of my Road to Regionals. These are the two decks I'm going to be taking. They need more work, especially NEH, although I'm a lot happier with Noise at the moment.