Last night was the fortnightly club night.

Still numbers are not back up to the heady heights that we were seeing earlier in the year. Marcin even commented so when he arrived.

That being said the seven of us that were there had a good time playing games.

We split into two tables. Four on one table playing Azul, and Camel Up. Whilst Marcin, Dave, and myself were on the other table playing Fallout the board game.

I’ve owned this game for a few years now, and it’s sat there on my pile of shame ever since.

It was only recently that I purchased the official play mat, plus the second expansion Atomic Bonds. This second expansion makes the game co-operative. Something I’m not keen to include. But you never know. It was a completeness purchase.

However the first expansion New California remains elusive. Mainly because the English version is out of print (you can pick up a German version very easily).

I think what has made the situation for New California even worse, and also driven demand for the base game is the popularity of the Amazon tv series.

I have played the modern third person version Fallout 3 back in about 2010 on my 360. I didn’t complete the game, or even get close. But I did enjoy the experience. I even went back and played a little of the original turn based rpg Fallout on a pc.

Obviously I enjoyed the recent Amazon tv series based on the Fallout games. Unlike a major trend over the years of adapting video games badly to the silver screen, Amazon actually did a decent job.

Last night we played Marcin’s copy of the game that had the New California expansion mixed in.

We played the introductory scenario Welcome to the Commonwealth with the extended map. I was playing the robot Mister Handy, Marcin played the Ghoul, and Ben was the Brotherhood Outcast.

The game was great fun.

I think it captured the theme really well through the art, miniatures, quests, and mechanics.

On your turn you get two actions. One is exploring. That allows you to flip over an adjacent unexplored tile. So you get that exploring feel, discovering new areas, revealing new threats.

The quests or encounters you can go on have some great thematic text to read out.

Combat is simple and quick. You roll three dice, hopefully getting the required bits of the body to defeat the enemy and not get any hits in return. The “AI” to move/activate enemies on the board was very simplistic. Which involved turning over an agenda card and looking at icons on the bottom of the card for what gets activated.

With the learn of the game, it took us roughly three hours to play.

Obviously I want to play some more of the game. I really did have great fun playing it.