Wednesday saw the Fenland Gamers monthly meet-up for December. This was the last monthly meet-up of 2016.  Where has the year gone?

We split up into two groups. Jonathan went to another table with Debbie and Diego, to play Plague Inc. While Gavin, Katie and I played Alien Frontiers.

Gavin has been looking at purchasing Alien Frontiers, while I owned it, and had been looking for an excuse to get it to the table. So before the meet-up I’d suggested we played the game at the meet-up for him to try it first.

I did like this dice placement, area control game. 

At first you think how do I mitigate poor dice rolls? Then you look at the alien artifact cards and some of these allow you to adjust the value of the dice by one, or reroll them. Which means if you get those cards it becomes easier placing your dice for the action you want. 

There is a little take that in the game, such as being able to steal resources from other players, or moving colony domes from one territory to another. And these bits of take that come from either alien artifact cards or one of the orbital facilities.

The alien artifact cards are a nice touch. I particularly like the fact that the majority give you a choice of two options to decide between. 

Controlling a territory gives you a power up you can use whilst you control that territory. That control can be fluid. 

During our game I was using alien artifact cards to move the colony domes of the others to give me a majority, and take a majority away from them in another territory where I had no interest.

Scoring isn’t going to be massive. It’s a fluid thing that goes up and down depending on control of territories, some alien artifact cards. As the rule book describes it, the scoreboard is a snap shot of the current state of play. 

Katie and I drew on the points in our game, but I won on the tie breaker of having the most alien artifact cards.

It’s my understanding there is going to be a big box release of Alien Artifacts in 2017. If that is the case I’ll definitely be buying it so I can get the expansions. The expansions seem to be a bit elusive to get hold of at the moment.

So that last paragraph should tell you I really liked the game.

Our final game of the evening was Love Letter Premium edition. 

This is a beautifully put together edition of the game. The extra thick playing cards, the card sleeves, heart tokens, the awesome game box. This just oozes high quality.

This edition supports up to eight players using extra cards being shuffled in for player counts over four. 

One or two of the new cards I didn’t recognise the abilities of. So I’m assuming they are new or from the Archer edition. Other abilities on the new cards are from other editions like The Hobbit edition. And I did like these new abilities. 

Jonathan didn’t like the additional cards because they made guessing harder and keeping track a bit tougher. Plus I think the player count doesn’t really work at the higher numbers. I think the sweet spot is 3-4 players for Love Letter. 

If I use this edition again I’ll stick to the sweet spot. But maybe use some of the new cards to replace some of the older ones to shake things up a little.

Katie and Diego drew as winners. 

A great evenings gaming. Great company. Second Wednesday of each month. 

We have three meet-ups over the Christmas period. I’m looking forward to them.