What a busy week at work so far. Staff training (I need to keep my thoughts about some of that to myself else I’ll get in trouble), team meetings and planning for next year. Life in the under funded and forgotten FE sector.

So the monthly Fenland Gamers meet up at its temporary home of the White Lion Hotel last night provided much needed respite.

Diego, Justin and myself played Scythe. Which for those that wisely avoided my recent Top 100 games will not know, is my number 1 game. According to the BG Stats app that I’m recording all plays with, it has been 5 months since I last played Scythe.

This was Justin’s first time playing this epic game.

I was playing the Nordic Kingdom for the first time. I have to admit I did like the factions special ability of having my workers being able to swim across rivers right from the start. Justin was playing Crimean Khanate, and Diego had Albion from the Invaders from Afar expansion.

Justin did well and got to the Factory first, with me quickly following. Much of my game plan then revolved around trying to abuse my chosen factory card which allowed me to either get a mech or building for the trivial cost of one popularity. So I was flipping mainly between my factory card and bolster which on my player board gave me a popularity after I had built my monument.

I did trigger the end of the game, but that was more out of self defense. Justin was hovering on 5 objective points, and Diego was on 4. I needed to win one combat to do that. Up until my go I had been eyeing up attacking Diego, but he drew two combat cards on his go. So he had the possibility of winning a battle. On the other hand Justin had no combat cards and zero bolster points. Perfect. So I built my last mech, and took the move action to attack Justin for the foregone victory.

Both Diego and I had zero or 1 popularity so were not going to get lots of points that way. I had zip resources at the end. After the dust had settled with Justin into the next scoring zone on the popularity track, he took first place. Whilst I managed to pip Diego to second. I suppose a better player would have worked out the optimal time to pull the trigger to end the game. They would have worked out every ones relative points, and maybe strung out the game for a turn or two more to maneuver the situation to their advantage and victory.

I really did enjoy getting Scythe back to the table. I had a blast playing it. Another great monthly meet up.