Category Archives: game night

game night

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.

Pandemic Legacy March

Fenland Gamers, game night, pandemic legacy season 1

Once more I issue the mandatory warning that this post may or may not contain spoilers for Pandemic Legacy. If you wish to avoid any possible spoilers stop reading now, and I'll see you in the next blog post.

Right now they have gone let's begin…

Last night saw the rescheduled play of the month of March that was meant to happen last week, but got cancelled due to illness with one of the team.

Funny enough three of the team were this week infected with some form or other of the lethal man flu (or in the case of Debs just a minor cold). Mind you I've had this cough, chesty thing since just before Christmas. It just might be time to see the doc about it.

Back to the game, before deciding what funded events we were going to use this month (because of the win we were down to six funded events that could go into the player deck), it was time to read the scenario for the month.

We were getting some military support and now able to build garrisons instead of the research centres if we wanted to. We also got two new objectives to try and achieve along side the default objective of finding cured for the three curable diseases. Our goal was to complete two out of the three objectives.

There was some confusion though with the mission card, and building garrisons. We had no counters to show a garrison had been built. The mission card told us to open up in order three items when we saw the numbers. Did that mean now, or would we be hitting these numbers later on? We played safe and decided to hold off opening them. This was very confusing, not as clear as the previous card.

We got a new possible team member to add to our rosta. Whose speciality tied in with the garrisons. Plus one of our new objectives was to build a garrison in each of the six zones on the board. The other new one was eradicate one disease.

Once we had chosen our funded events, we drew the initial outbreaks, and then decided which of our three starting research stations we were going to start from. For the last time we also got to place a quarantine marker during set up.

This was an even closer game than February. We eradicated C-Thatcam Major, it was the easiest one to do. I only needed four cards to get the cure, and also now didn't need to be in a research station to find the cure. So naturally that was the first cure we got, and we also managed to eradicate it. One objective down.

Debs and Jonathan were busy keeping COdA-403b under control using quarantine markers. Our unnamed yellow disease got cured. We just had to find a cure for Sithite.

Epidemics happened, as did the outbreaks, COdA-403b came dangerously close to costing us the game. Our planning was based around trying to get Matt and Debbie in the same city to hand a single Sithite city card to Debs, so we could complete the second objective.

This was going to be closer than the previous month, there were five cards left, three by the time it was Debbie's turn. But she had drawn the the fifth Sithite city previously, no need to meet up with Matt. Just a dash to the nearest research centre and discover the cure, all in four actions!

We had won!! But only by the thinnest of margins.

After reading the end of mission legacy card, and seeing the extra rewards to choose from, we choose our winners rewards.

Still the mystery of the garrisons existed. We decided that we had already seen them, and opened up the relevant panels and boxes. There were garrison pieces, a new upgrade of having starting garrisons, a new build garrison action. This should have been done at the start. But that wording was soooo confusing. Jonathan vowed to go read spoilers for March to see what others did. Would this have made the month easier having a garrison in Sithite territory? Would we have got an easier victory being able to build the six required garrisons? Well we will never know.

I think the wording on the mission card could have been better, less ambiguous. Or were we just missing the obvious, and being dumb?

April is going to be HARD…

 

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner

Fenland Gamers, game night

Second Wednesday of the month? Must mean it was that time of month for the regular Fenland Gamer meet up.

The five amigos of Jonathan, Debbie, Jo, Kate and myself met up once more to play games, share banter, and generally have an enjoyable evening with like minded people. Which is pretty worrying really because if the rests minds are like mine this world is in serious trouble.

Our evening of gaming kicked off with Formula D or as it correctly should have been called

Driving Ms Daisy the Sequel

We rolled the black dice for our starting grid positioning. Jonathan and Katie drew for pole position, which meant a face off for the coveted spot, while Debbie and I also were in a face off for the third spot, leaving Jo unchallenged for the back of the grid.

Katie took pole position in the end, while Jonathan was in second, Debbie was in third place, I took the fourth starting position, with Jo bringing up the rear.

After doing all the hard work to win pole position, Katie stalled her engine and was left stranded on the track. Jonathan was able to straight away press forward with this advantage to try and snag the lead, and rolled a one to draw level on the track.

Debbie and I moved closer to the front two, while Jo edged a space nearer, but still at the back.

Katie was stuck in first for her second roll of the dice, while Jonathan took an early lead switching to second. Debbie and I over took Katie.

After the first corner I took the lead away from Jonathan. Which I quickly squandered allowing Katie, Jonathan and Debbie to catch me up and over take me while negotiating the second and third corner. Jo was still, pottering behind in last place, looking good to claim the title of “Driving Ms Daisy” away from Debbie.

Katie started to pull away from everyone, while I managed to over take Jonathan and Debbie. The corners in this game are such a great leveller. Careful management of the damage to your car, can allow you to catch up and steal the lead if the others are being much more careful. It was this carefree cavalier attitude to damage as a resource that saw me coming out of the three stop corner hot on Katie's wheels.

Down the long straight Katie and I shifted through the gears opening up the gap between us and Jonathan. It looked like Jo and Debbie would be fighting it out for the Ms Daisy crown.

As Katie and I started to work our way around the final set of corners before the home straight, Jonathan caught up to us. Katie edged a space lead over me as we game out of the final corner. But I was in a higher gear than Katie. Katie rolled her dice, she was one space short of the finish line. If I rolled a sixteen I had won. I rolled a fifteen. But my inside line put me one space away from the finish line too, but ahead of Katie on the board. I'd won, I'd be rolling first.

I took first place, Katie nabbed an easy second, while Jonathan crossed the line for third.

But there was still a battle going on through the final corners between Debbie and Jo. Neither wanting to claim the “Driving Ms Daisy” title. Last corner Jo was set up nicely to make a dash for the finish. Debbie needed to push her luck to catch up. She over shot the first of the final two corners by thirteen spaces!!! Her engine blew up, she was out of the race. Jo finished fourth, leaving the burning wreck of Debbie's car on the track.

Debbie had successfully defended her “Driving Ms Daisy” title!!! Well I suppose it would be more accurate to describe it as begrudgingly accepted the title again.

My win meant that out of the two plays of the game, I had continued the record that the owner of the game wins the race!

Raw fish!

Our second game of the evening was the drafting, set collecting game Sushi Go! Which had the soy sauce promo shuffled into the deck.

I'm not going to go into much detail of this game, except to say that I proved to be the most greedy on the night, managing to scoff my way to a victory.

Oh wow, I'd won the second game of the evening too! I was on a winning streak. How'd that happen? Mind you it made a pleasant change to my loosing streak Tuesday night with Netrunner.

Our third and final game of the evening was

Alhambra

You could tell I hadn't played my copy before because the cards were still in the cellophane. Something that winds Jonathan up a little. Mind games people, mind games. I had thought of totally throwing him off his game and taking yellow also. But I just couldn't be that cruel.

We were playing with the Castles promo (which can be picked up from the bgg store).

After our first round scoring, I noticed that once more Jonathan was employing his hog the cards tactic, and then make a mad purchasing rush towards the end to snatch the win. Jo decided to employ the same tactic, which you can see in the photo above they have half the deck of cards between them. Ok I maybe exaggerating that a little, but they had a lot of cards in their hands. It was interesting because it seemed Jonathan was advertising the fact having the cards fanned out in his hand. I know that was for him to see easily what he had. But I suspect there was a bit of the magician in him that likes holding them that way too. Jo on the other hand almost seemed that she was trying to disguise the fact she had a lot of cards.

But you know what? Despite having a load of cards in her hand, Jo would say there was nothing she could do or buy!!!! Which we did call her on.

During the game there were a couple of times because Debbie went before me, that she blocked me by either buying a tile I needed/wanted or took a card I wanted.

Second round scoring, Jonathan still hadn't kicked his tactic in to top gear, and was still lagging at the back on the scoring. But I knew any minute he would start building a scoring monster for the final scoring at the end. The rest of us were all within easy striking distance of each other. But Debbie was just in the lead.

Something went wrong for Jonathan, the tiles weren't falling for him, others were getting ones he needed. Final scoring hit, Jonathan managed to over take Katie on the scoreboard, but he was unable to catch Jo up, and ended twenty nine points short of the joint winners for the game Debbie and myself on ninety points.

The evening ended with some talk about Kickstarter and policing the streets of Commonville before we parted our separate ways.

What a great evening, I had a winning streak, played some great games with great people.

Tomorrow another Streets of Commonville play through. ^__^

That One Moment…

chatteris warlords, game night, netrunner

Last night saw another duel of bluffs and counter bluffs at the Chatteris Warlords gaming group as I took on a new opponent in Android:Netrunner.

The first game in our head to head duel was my newly constructed NEH deck against my favourite Anarch Noise.

My opponent took an early lead scoring agendas, mainly from my HQ. I was landing tags on Noise, and did cause four meat damage with a scorched earth. I managed to score some agendas to bring it back to a five/six score, with the runner being the six. Noise made a run on my HQ with two cards in my hand, both agendas. Noise had won!

I know where I have to go with this deck, I need to think about the ice, and doing more once the tags have landed. But for a first effort I didn't think it did too bad.

Our second game was my Noise against Core set Jinteki Personal Evolution. I know that with the Most Wanted List hitting particular Noise staples there will most likely be an exodus from the ID for other more green pastures. But I'm not abandoning Noise. We were instant bff's, and I stick by my friends.

My Noise deck was unchanged from last week. I wasn't going to rush into making changes based on one game. Before I start “tweaking” the deck I want at least a couple more plays before deciding what to change to correct any perceived weaknesses.

I was really doing well with Noise, I had Wyldside and Pancakes install, Street Beggar had cards on it, I had used Inject a couple of times, economy could have been better, didn't help Aesop's got trashed early by my opponent.

But with Faust installed, an unprotected Archives (for a good majority of the game), an R&D which had been left unprotected for a surprising length of time, with Medium sitting nicely with six virus counters on it (before a virus purge was eventually done) I scored five agenda points.

However during this golden spell my opponent managed to land some net damage on me taking out a KEY card! My only copy of Levy AR Lab Access got thrown onto the heap, although I had worse did do its job and get three cards back into my hand.

Levy was my only way to recycle my heap back into the stack, and it was gone!!!

You can guess what happened?

I ran out of cards. All the servers were iced up, I had no cards to fuel Faust to get in. I had ground to a stand still. Five agenda points scored, while my corporate opponent hadn't scored anything yet, and I was having to concede the game!

Losing the Levy was basically the key moment of the game. I was breaking in to the main servers at will until I ran out of cards. The card draw, getting loads of cards in to fuel Faust all worked to plan.

So despite earlier saying I wasn't going to tweak the deck, I knew I needed to tweak it for this situation. My first thought was to add a second Levy to the deck. But on my drive home I kicked myself for being so blinkered. I didn't need a second Levy, I needed Same Old Thing instead. It would give me a lot more flexibility than having a second Levy.

So there you have it back to back loses last night. But you know what? I still had a blast. I love this game, plus there are plans to have a draft matchup using the FFG draft packs at the end of the month. I'm looking forward to that.

For those remotely interested here is my NEH deck..

Near-Earth Hub (Upstalk)

Agenda (15)

1x 15 Minutes (Data and Destiny)

3x AstroScript Pilot Program (Core Set) (MWL)

2x Award Bait (Old Hollywood)

2x Chronos Project (First Contact)

1x Explode-a-palooza (Old Hollywood)

1x Market Research (Fear and Loathing)

2x Private Security Force (Core Set)

3x Project Beale (Future Proof)

Asset (19)

2x Adonis Campaign (Core Set) ····

2x City Surveillance (Mala Tempora)

2x Daily Business Show (All That Remains)

2x Early Premiere (Old Hollywood)

2x Franchise City (The Universe of Tomorrow)

2x Ghost Branch (Core Set)

2x News Team (Data and Destiny)

2x PAD Campaign (Core Set)

1x Reversed Accounts (Up and Over)

2x Shannon Claire (Data and Destiny)

Upgrade (1)

1x Cyberdex Virus Suite (Order and Chaos)

Operation (5)

2x Media Blitz (Data and Destiny)

1x Scorched Earth (Core Set) ····

2x Shipment from SanSan (Second Thoughts)

Barrier (2)

2x Wall of Static (Core Set)

Code Gate (8)

2x Archangel (Data and Destiny)

2x Pop-up Window (Cyber Exodus)

3x Tollbooth (Core Set)

1x Turing (Breaker Bay) ···

Sentry (7)

2x Turnpike (Data and Destiny)

2x Uroboros (A Study in Static)

2x Pup (Honor and Profit) ··

1x Gutenberg (Breaker Bay)

Cards in deck: 57 (min 45)

13/14 (17-3) influence used

3 cards from MWL

Agenda Points: 25

Cards up to Data and Destiny

 

Patrolling the Streets of Commonville

Fenland Gamers, game night, play test

At the end of my post on a playtest of the in development game Streets of Commonville was I'd like to try the game with less players. Last night that wish came true after our planned attempt at the month of March in Pandemic Legacy had to be rescheduled due to illness of a team member.

So last night Jonathan and myself patrolled the mean streets of Commonville, bringing justice and fitting up an innocent suspect for crimes they never did.

At Jonathan's request I filmed the game so that the play through could be later analysed by himself and his co-designer.

Since the play through last week there had been some “minor” changes to the rules and pieces.

I will say during our play through the dice really did hate Jonathan and me.

One of the most obvious changes is that Jonathan now had these fun little donut tokens to replace the printed cardboard ones.

The character boards were changed so that at the higher rankings you had a choice to make between having an extra dice or donut. The action tracking was now controlled by the roll of the “time” dice. I did like these two changes.

Technically the game won last night because we failed to arrest a suspect within the allowed time limit of the game. However we kept playing to see how much longer it would take us to complete the game (bottom left of the photo above, we used dice to track the extra game time).

I did feel that the game board was too large to explore for two players, and that maybe there needs to be a mid point board configuration between the full setup and the solo setup for two players.

Between the two sessions I had thought that the street tiles could be smaller, which Jonathan had already got in the works. Great minds and all that.

Surprisingly it took Jonathan and I approx 90 mins to finish the game. Although as I explained earlier we played until we completed the game. If we had kept to the rules and the game winning, I the game would have lasted about an hour (naturally that will be confirmed once the designers have reviewed the tape).

Although Jonathan had replaced the character tracking token, I thought to stay thematic the tracking token could be a wooden token in the shape of a cop (similar to the security guard wooden token in Burgle Bros. see photo below)

I think this would work thematically. The cop car riding round the streets of Commonville, and the cop figure for the character tracking.

At the end of the game Jonathan and I had a brief discussion about an ability that could be added for a character. It will be interesting to see if he runs with that one.

There will be another play through later in the week with three or four players, looking forward to that.

 

The Streets of Commonville A Playtest

Fenland Gamers, first look, game night, play test

Thursday night saw Jonathan play testing the game The Streets of Commonville with myself, Debbie and Les.

The Streets of Commonville is a multiplayer co-op update of the single player print and play game Inspector Moss: House Arrest. Which won the 2011 Solitaire Print and Play Contest on bgg, and was a 2012 nominee for the Golden Geek Awards Best Print and Play award.

Inspector Moss and Streets of Commonville are designed by the partnership of Jonathan Warren and Rebekah Bissell.

Which meant this playtest session we were playing with one of the designers. Not quite Eric Lang or Ignacy Trzewiczek but still a local hero and a pretty cool thing to be doing.

Before I go any further with this post two or three of the photos here are property of Jonathan who I “borrowed” them from.

The Streets of Commonville sees you working as a team of cops, uncovering evidence, finding suspects, and working to eliminate them from your enquiries, until you have one guilty suspect left.

At the moment the game uses a fixed board layout as suggested in the rule book. Apart from the centre tile, the rest are turned blank side up until players move around the board to new locations revealing surrounding tiles. A kind of fog of war mechanic. I like this hidden information, exploration element. When you reveal a tile, the players get to decide amongst themselves which way round the tile is placed. Although it helps that the other players show the tiles revealed on their go to the others while deciding the best way to place the tile.

I have been mulling with the thought since playing does this game need all the tiles used in the session layer out at the start. Or could the tiles be added as the game progresses and have a more organic, less predictable map, similar to the Zombie! game.

Jonathan showed us another version of the player board. Which I preferred, same number of upgrades but you have to make decisions on the bonus you get, between more dice or more donuts.

Below are my notes from playing the game that we were asked to make. Jonathan requested that I include them on the blog so they are easy to find and share with his co-designer.

My notes for Jonathan to refer to!

  • The player aid needs to have the turn summary on it.
  • There needs to be some way to record the colour of your character piece on the board. This could be just having the upgrade tracker being the same colour as the main piece.
  • There needs to be more options/ways for players to upgrade their characters. Time based upgrades?
  • The rules do need some work. I'd like to see an annotated diagram explaining the game tile.
  • There needs to be graphics in the rules illustrating game play and certain situations that may arise.
  • You could remove the placing of the street punks tokens at the start, add tiles with a symbol for the street punks on, and shuffle those tiles into the tiles used for the game. The placement would be more random then, allow more adjustment for the number of players in the game to control difficulty and opportunities to upgrade.
  • At the moment I think thematically you shouldn't be able to ignore the street punks. Enter a tile with street punks on, you have to deal with them first before being able to do anything else.
  • Currently you can pass as many dice as you like between players using your donut. If as planned this gets reduced to one or two based on the number of donuts you have, then the ability to upgrade becomes even more important.
  • Make the game real time? This would cure AP, or curtail it. There is potential for an alpha gamer in the current game, a real time clock may help control that too.

 

I enjoyed playing the game, at the moment it did at times seem a puzzle to solve of how best to optimise the use of the dice, who gets passed what to achieve the best possible outcome that turn.

But still there is the basis of a good game here. I'm looking forward to playing it some more, especially with less players to see how it fairs.

 

Warlords Running Tuesday!

chatteris warlords, game night, netrunner

Last night I was back over to Chatteris for the Tuesday night meet up of the Chatteris Warlords. This being my second visit meant I had to fork out moolah and join the working men's club that the meet is held in (£10.50 yearly membership fee once two brave souls nominated/seconded me as a member, then £1 for joining the Gaming group for the year, and finally £1 for attending the meet).

My evening started off putting the current iteration of my Noise deck together. Then testing it against if I remember correctly an NBN deck.

I hit the corp running, using a few of the tricks I had in hand like DDOS, and Streetpeddler. The deck was working as I had intended, except in the area of economy, which needs a little tinkering.

The game came down to one run, if I didn't get past the two ice and steal the agenda, then the corp would score it on their go and get the win. If I steal it I'm victorious. My only ice breaker is Faust. I break through the first ice, the second ice is rezed and I can't use Faust with it! Foiled at the last hurdle. Well we know how this story ends. I should have run on that server earlier in the game, I had solutions, particularly the anarch favourite Parasite.

We swapped alliagiances and I played my NBN Making News deck against the Shaper Kate. My NBN deck needs a lot of work. It's an initial idea. I haven't even looked into if any of the Data and Destiny Deluxe Expanasion with its new NBN cards would make an improvement.

Somehow I managed to get a win. I think if my opponent had been a bit more aggressive on running we may have been looking at a different outcome.

It's great to see a meta taking root. There is even talk of getting a store kit for a tournament! That would be cool.

Other games going on last night were X-Wing (with some of the new Force Awakens ships), and a game of X-Com.

X-Com is one of those games that has the app as an integral part of the game. Meaning it can't be played without it. Which as I have stated before is why I won't personally buy the game. I'd like to have a play of the game though. Apparently in a discussion about the game and its reliance on the app, it appears there may be rules on line from the publisher that allow the game to be played without the app. So yes I'd like to try the game without the app also. This could be the compromise that sees me buying the game (assuming the results of both plays are favourable).

If you are wondering still why go read the Golem Arcana Final Expansion post HERE. I've never played the game so I'm not aware just how integral to the game the app is. Can it be played still with out the app? The next release of Android or iOS could completely nerf the app. It has been known for an OS update to do that to apps until the have been rebuilt with the new libraries.

I'd love to hear Ignacy's response/view to this.

But I've digressed, time to look at my NBN deck.