Yesterday saw some gaming taking place.

It started off with a lunchtime game of Keyforge with the two decks I traded for (Bellandini, the Ranger of Whistlecorner and HRH Threeteen, the Bizzarre Distiller). The honours were shared one game each. And we did the whole swap decks after the first game thing. So we both got to play both decks. They actually felt pretty balanced against each other. I liked the archive mechanic one of the decks had.

Like all good tcg/lcg games there has to the odd card that it’s not entirely clear how to interrupt it’s text. One such card is Bait and Switch. It’s ambiguous text can be interrupted as meaning you steal 1 ember, then if they still have more steal another. Or it can be read that you keep stealing ember until your opponent no longer has more ember than you.

After some investigation while I wrote this post, the intent is it keeps repeating, so it’s the later interruption that is correct.

But despite that uncertainty about the cards text, I like this card a lot. It’s one of those cards you’d like a couple more of in your deck. It’s a control card that’s ideal to stop that key being forged, and give you a boost to your own ember production, possibly into a forging opportunity yourself. It’s why shadows and dis are fastly becoming my favourite houses in Keyforge. I must keep an eye out for a deck that has both plus maybe brobnar or logos. I’m probably leaning more to logos as the third house in hopes of getting my favourite art on the cards at the moment Wild Wormhole (I’d love the playmat of this art, sadly it’s only available as the top prize in the current organised play kits).

In the evening Jonathan and I met up to surprisingly to play some games.

Our first game of the evening was Reykholt, which was the latest addition to Jonathan’s collection of Uwe Rosenberg games. I think, and I may be wrong on this (I’m sure Jonathan will correct me in the comments if I am), Rosenberg’s latest game, and an early copy thanks to one or two retailers bringing copies over from Essen.

So Reykholt boils down to being a fun light worker placement game that takes place over seven rounds.

Each round you get 3 actions to select, which range from building greenhouses to grow crops, seeding a crop, harvesting crops, getting certain veg types (which can be used for seeding or in the tourism stage to advance) or even destroying greenhouses to advance on the tourism track. The tourism track is how you determine the winner of the game. The player who is furthest along it wins.

So during your turn you are having to balance between getting the veg required to enable you to advance along the tourism track, growing more veg for current and future rounds, and getting greenhouses to enable you to grow more.

Despite being a light worker placement game, there are still interesting decisions to make. The round counter and limited number of actions keep the pressure on, and make you focused. I also like that you can always advance at least one position on the tourism track and gain the resources that new position has. These resources under normal circumstances for that position are the cost to move onto that space. You are also limited to doing this once per turn. But used wisely it can be used to give you the resources to advance on maybe even during the current turn, but most likely on a future one.

I did use the greenhouse destruction to great affect in the later rounds to advance me along the tourism track, to spots where I had the required resources to advance. Plus I had a blindingly good first turn that advanced me 4 or more places on the tourism track.

The history books will show that I beat Jonathan. But despite that I did enjoy the game, and would like to try it at the higher player counts.

Our second game of the evening was Keyforge.

This was Jonathan suffering a style of game he doesn’t enjoy as a way of making up for me having to play a game of his! Which wasn’t really necessary because I’m happy playing most games (except dire Rick and Morty themed games which is all of them).

This was a learning game, so after the earlier experience I used the same decks again. Yes they are a bit more advanced than the starter learning decks. But as I pointed out earlier in this post I thought they were pretty well balanced against each other.

I actually lost this game down to a massive mistake by me. We were both at two forged keys, I had six ember and ready to forge on my turn. Jonathan played a card that stopped me forging a key, by basically making me skip the forge key step. Jonathan then got to six ember himself. I just needed to name the right house, capture an ember from Jonathan, and then forge the key on my next turn. But I called the wrong house, l played two cards from hand, went to activate the creature to capture the ember, and I couldn’t. It was the wrong house. I couldn’t stop Jonathan from winning. It was such a doh! moment.

So history will record that as a win for Jonathan.

I had a great evening gaming. And a great lunchtime session too.