Yesterday was the Christmas meet up for The Fenland Gamers, the first of our holiday season sessions, at the wonderful The Luxe Cinema. Whilst we played games the regular patrons of the cinema were enjoying showings of Mary Poppins Returns.

Jonathan and I had arrived a couple of hours earlier than the scheduled time to play some games together.

Our first game of this pre-meet up session was Pick-omino or as my German copy of the game calls it Heckmeck am Bratwurmeck (has English rules). My Dutch friend Janne calls it by a much simpler name Worms.

Janne is how I found out about the game. Friday Janne posted a photo on Facebook looking sad, having just lost a game by a large margin against her partner. Something she apparently never does. So being the naturally curious person I am, I asked what the game was. Janne told me. So after a quick google, I saw that it was a Reiner Knizia game. Which peaked my interest, he is after all a designer I like. My quick research gave the impression it was a press your luck style game. I was curious. Janne really enjoyed the game, Amazon had the German edition (which I knew had English rules inside) for less than £20, I had prime. The only question left was would it arrive in time for Saturdays game session?

There was some real doubt yesterday that it would arrive in time. When it is Amazon using their own delivery services instead of a third party, for some reason I’m usually the last house on the drivers route. Which means my orders usually arrive late in the evening. Imagine my surprise, and relief when the game arrived at 3:15pm. Just in time for the evenings gaming.

So after all that I suppose you would like to know about the game.

Worms (I’ll call it that from now on in this post for brevity reasons) is really fun. Knizia certainly knows how to use the push your luck element to make fun games. The production on this version is pretty good. It came with some pretty solid, nice weight to them, domino tiles and 8 wooden dice. For my tastes I’m not a big wooden dice fan, they feel too light in the hands for me. But after a roll or two I soon forgot about that.

The rules are so simple, and easy to teach. That’s such a big bonus for a game like this.

I like the fact when you reroll the remaining dice you can’t select a dice value you have already selected previously. So as you keep going the chances of you rolling values that will end your turn without scoring increases.

There is a nice take that element in the game where you can steal the top tile of a players stack of tiles if you roll the exact value of the tile.

The repercussions of pushing your luck too far or not scoring high enough to get a tile are “fun” too. End up with a failed turn, and you lose the top tile of your stack. Which returns back to the middle, and the highest valued tile (if it is not the tile you just placed back) gets flipped over, and is out of the game.

This game played really well at two players. Next more players to see how it holds up.

Jonathan and I played two games and shared the honours. This bit is for Janne if she ever reads the post. Games with a similar push your luck mechanic and dice worth looking at Zombie Dice, and Age of War. Both small games, easy to carry around to play on the go. Bigger games that use it King of Tokyo/New York, Run,Fight or Die! and Elder Sign. There is a bit more game to these, but the core mechanic is still that push your luck element.

Our second game was Kamisado Max. This was one of Jonathan’s grail games which he managed to pick up at a real bargain price.

Despite Jonathan kicking my butt on this game (twice) I really liked this abstract game. Once again like all good abstract games, it has a simple rule set that is quick to teach and learn. But that simplicity hides a deeper depth to the game than first appears.

The production on this edition of the game is stunning. Although in the less than perfect lighting of our venue it was a little hard to tell the difference between similar colours on a couple of the castles.

I liked the fact that the colour square your piece ends on determines the coloured piece your opponent must move on their turn.

Oh and the games were nice and quick.

Below can you spot the photo of Jonathan below where he knows he’s won, and my delaying tactics of taking photos isn’t working?

I could like Worms, suggest similar abstract games that folks might enjoy. But I’m going to talk about one of them in a second. If you would like me to do this on a regular basis when I talk about games in similar posts, let me know in the comments.

We finished off our early gaming session with Onitama and the newly released Way of the Wind expansion.

The expansion was a welcomed excuse to get this great abstract game back to the table. It had shockingly been over a year since I’d last played the game. Naturally we were a bit rusty on one or two of the basic rules.

With the expansion a new piece is added to the board that can be controlled by both players, along with new cards, and a modified set up.

I’m going to cut to the chase and say although I like the expansion. It brings new tactical elements and decisions to make to the game. This is not one of those must have expansions that you would say the base game has to be played with. It’s a take it or leave it expansion, that can be used to add a bit of variety to the game if you are playing the game so often you need to shake things up a little.

Jonathan and I played three games in the end before the others arrived for the official start of the evenings gaming. I edged the honours winning two games to one.

I had just finished showing Jonathan how little difference there was between Grifters: Nexus and the original version. Component wise it’s identical. When Diego arrived. As we started explaining Worms to him, others turned up. Which meant we ended up playing a 6 player game of Worms.

It surprisingly held up at that player count. The game supports upto 7 players. There was a lot more of the stealing tiles in the game we had. The down time wasn’t too bad either, with a bit of politics going on trying to encourage the current player to steal some-one else’s top tile.

Thanks to Janne I think we have another group staple here.

During Worms we had two more turn up. So we split into two groups of four to play games after the game was finished. Suffice to say Jonathan and I didn’t win the game of Worms.

In Jonathan’s group they played Dice Hospital. While the group I was in played the press your luck game Deep Sea Adventure. I’d not played the game for a long time, so I was a little rusty again on the rules. Unsurprisingly after 3 rounds I scored absolutely zero points. Which won’t come as a surprise to anyone that I didn’t win.

Our group followed up with a couple of games of Kingdomino. I actually managed to win one of these games.

The other group were nearly finished playing Dice Hospital, so we squeezed in a quick game of Love Letter: Batman (my favourite version of the game). Amazingly I managed to have the most points when it came time to end because the other group had finished with Diego getting the victory. So that goes down as a win for me too.

The evening was finished off with an eight player game of Perudo. To accommodate this number of players Jonathan had to get his copy of the game too. My copy of Liars Dice only plays six tops. Eight players all shaking plastic cups full of dice is apparently noisy. Who would have guessed? But with such a high player count the game still held up to the stress test. After the noise had died down, the bluffing called, Diego once again ended up top of the heap.

After packing away there was a bit of chatting, and stuffing faces full of popcorn by one or two.

After such a great evenings gaming there was only one way for it to be topped off. Yep dodgy meat smothered in chilli sauce, some salad thrown over it, all in the middle of a warmed up wrap.

The Luxe Cinema were once again their usual amazing selfs (despite the curve ball or two thrown by one of our members during the evening), and a big thank you for allowing us to use them as our venue for playing games. Without them we would have struggled to have a free venue to play our games. And it was very generous of them to step up and fill the void left when our previous venue closed.

Thanks to Jonathan you get a Christmas treat of some photos of me, or with me in from the evening of gaming.