Have 2 weeks passed already? A Friday evening gaming and a monthly meetup in the same week, that’s always a good week. Jonathan had repaired the table. Which I’m very grateful for. He saved the day.

According to the Facebook event we were expecting to be a total of 3 turning up. But ended up as 7 in total. It’s a bit annoying when this happens because we generally use the information from the event page to help guide what games to take along.

We split into 2 groups. James and I played a learning game of Targi. Whilst the other 5 played Forbidden Sky. I bought Targi as a purchase of opportunity at Tabletop Gaming Live the other weekend. It had been on my radar since Zee looked at it on the Dice Tower YouTube channel earlier in the year.

Targi is a 2 player worker placement game, with some set collection thrown in. Because of the number of players playing the other game James and myself were playing on a table that was just big enough for the main board. We had to use chairs for the player tableaus.

I liked the robber mechanic used in the game. It acts as a timer for the game for starters. Once the robber has completed a circuit of the board the game ends, unless the other game end trigger happens first. The robber is also used to block actions. As the robber moves on to a space, that space is not available for selection that round by players. And finally there are 4 spaces (the corners) on the board that when the robber lands on them trigger the players having to give up resources,gold or victory points.

The whole taking turns to select actions on the outside of the board, and not being able to select a row column occupied by the other player is nice. Because you are also getting to take the tribe or goods card in the middle where your Targi intersect, you are having to try and balance between choosing actions you really want and getting the goods/tribe card in the middle you really want. Sometimes these are mutually exclusive. I love the fact you only take the actions selected at the end of the round when you remove the counter. You get to select the order things resolve. That way you get to make sure you have the resources needed to buy that tribe card.

It’s cool the middle area of the board is constantly changing as you use the goods or buy the tribe card there. Especially when the used card gets replaced by its opposite. So a tribe card gets replaced by a goods card, and vice versa.

There is no resource hogging in this game, you are not allowed more than 10 goods and 3 gold to carry over between rounds. Any excess gets returned to the general supply.

The set collection element of the tribe cards for your tableau is nice. The fact they only score on complete rows of 4 is a great touch. Either player getting 12 tribe cards in their tableau also triggers the end of the game.

You can probably tell there is a lot to this game. I haven’t covered everything, about 80% or 90% of it. It actually took longer to play than I thought it would for a 2 player game. Maybe that’s because it was our learning game. But still it was a very enjoyable game, and definitely one I’m glad to add to my collection of 2 player games. The only issue with this whole game category is they don’t get played often enough.

Oh the history books will record that James beat me by a narrower margin than I thought it would be. I think there were 4 points between us, and that’s despite him having a complete 12 card tableau to mine incomplete one of half the cards.

As luck would have it both games finished at roughly the same time.

Our second game of the evening was a members favourite, the dice bluffing game Perudo. This time I was able to bluff my way to victory.

We finished the evening off with Small Detectives. A great little find by Jonathan, and still enjoyable. I think this was the first time I’d played it at the full player count of 5. Not sure if the optimal player count is 3 and 4 for this game. 5 players meant I was being blocked a lot of the time, I saw only one tile before Jonathan correctly guessed the solution. So it worked out in his favour, he got to see enough to make a correct guess. I did suspect and was proved correct afterwards that one player (the tablebreaker) had been cheating and making a note of the suspects and weapons they’d seen on their phone. It’s a memory game, you have 6 things in total to remember. I’m not impressed by this person as you may be able to tell. Still no apology for breaking the table. Although Jonathan did make a brave attempt at defusing any tension, and the elephant in the room by making light of the table incident. Jonathan compliments me quite well, he’s a better human being than me. I still had as little to do with the tablebreaker as possible.

It was a great evening of gaming. The staff at The Luxe were super amazing as usual. Fantastic hosts.

Last night was the October monthly meet up for the Fenland Gamers at our amazingly generous hosts The Luxe Cinema.

The evening started off well. Jonathan had finally joined the Ice Blast Crew! It’s the drink of choice for the group. Jonathan and Nathan had a rare opportunity to direct the banter at me. I give as good as I get, and it’s nice for them to get this rare occasion where they have the upper hand. My turn will come again.

We split into 2 gaming groups, a group of 4 and group of 3.

Jonathan, Gavin and myself started off playing Kingdomino. I hadn’t played Kingdomino before. I know it had a bit of buzz when it came out, and it’s got an expansion and a follow up, was even nominated for an award or two. But it had not made my radar for something to play. Gavin was keen to try it, and I was happy to give it a go.

Wow. How much fun is the game? Lots. It is quick to teach, simple mechanics to grasp, and quick to play. I love the tile selection mechanic used to determine the order of choosing in the following round. It presents some nice tough decisions to make with such a simple mechanic. Do you go for that tile you really need and chose last next time? Do you hate draft to block someone else? Which could also potentially mean you get to chose last. Or do you try and get that first selection for the next round because there is a tile you really must have?

Then you have the placement mechanic working along the lines of the pub classic dominos, and being limited to a 5 x 5 grid, and getting an end game scoring bonus if your start tile is in the dead centre of a completed 5 x 5 grid.

That is literally all there is to the game, a handful of simple mechanics that seem to work so well together to create a fast, fun game.

Somehow in our 3 player game I managed to run away with the victory. But we then added a fourth player, taught the game in seconds, and we were back playing. This time I was getting less of the selections I really wanted. A few rounds I was finding hard not to be the one choosing last, because that was the only option I was left with. There was very little denial drafting going on. I thought Jonathan was running away with the game, he had large scoring areas that we had failed to prevent. Sadly those scoring areas were also ones I was going for early on also. But when it came down to the final scoring, I lost to Jonathan by 4 points. That was a lot closer than I thought it would be. So yes I was first loser.

Our second game of the evening was another new game to me, No Thanks!. Wow another simple game to learn, but so much fun. You either take the current card or pass and place a token on it. If you have no tokens in front of you, you can’t pass. So you are forced to take cards until you get some tokens. The idea is to have at the end of the game the lowest score. That’s an over simplification of the card bit, which involves collecting runs of cards, say 33,32,31,30 but you only score the lowest value of the run. So that example run would be worth 30 points. I also didn’t mention that there are 9 cards removed at the start of the game from the deck. So there may or may not be a run, and you get stuck with a high value card. Sometimes you need to take that high value card because there are just too many tokens on it, that the points it will give you out weighs the fact you need those tokens. I lost the first game we played on the tie breaker. Gavin won our second game, and I won the third and final game. And yes it was that much fun.

For me No Thanks joins the ranks of Red 7, The Mind and Love Letter: Batman that are fun little filler games that should always be in the bag. So yes this will be joining the collection real soon.

Our final game of the evening was The Resistance. 8 resistance fighters, but they had been infiltrated by 3 traitors. A fun way to have everyone playing together at the end of the evening. Luckily I was using my copy of the game that I use with students. With the mess that the Ice Blast drinks create from the ice on the outside melting, and one or two players being less than careful with game components, this worn copy of the game was the ideal one to use. And these two points are starting to become a bit of an issue on club nights. Our hobby is an expensive one, some of the games we own and play are beautifully made and expensive. So you would hope/expect those playing to show a little respect to using someone else’s game. Sadly it’s not happening. Which does make you reluctant to bring games along to play.

However back to our hunt to find those traitors to the cause, who were sabotaging our missions. Our first mission was a roaring success, despite us having to refresh our memories to the rules. Mission 2 was foiled, there was definitely a traitor in our ranks. But who? Mission 2 had 2 people from the initial mission and 2 newbies. It had to be one of the newbies. Mission 3 was a roaring success. I’d been on all 3, and I think by now the majority had been on a mission. So despite having been on 2 successful missions I was under suspicion. Mission 4 I wasn’t on, but somehow a traitor had managed to sneak on to the team and once again sabotage it. It was all down to the final mission. We thought we knew who weren’t spies. The final missions team was selected, and it was a failure. The traitors had won. when the smoke cleared, we had identified correctly 2 of the traitors. But Jonathan had done the con job of the century and managed to avoid suspicion the whole game.

After the game as we were clearing up, I was once more the brunt of banter from my good friends. This time teasing me about being a fanboy who wouldn’t sell out. So yes that time had come again real quick. Twice in the same evening. I must be getting old. I enjoy the banter, it’s good fun, nothing nasty. Although I forgot to pay Gavin back for his awful joke on Twitter the other day. It was truly awful and deserved retaliation. Ok the joke was “which spice girl can carry the most petrol?”, “Jerri Can”. See it was bad.

Then the evening went tits up once more. The frickin’ idiot who I talked about previously, broke my folding table I use for gaming. The folding table the club uses for our game nights now at The Luxe. Snapped two rivets connecting the legs to the supports that keep them in place when set up. The support collapses, is held rigged by a sliding metal ring. But no if it won’t collapse, just repeatedly force and break it. Not a word of apology, offer to fix it, or replace it. To say that I was not happy was yet again an understatement. I really don’t know what to do about the guy.

Jonathan kindly offered to take the table home and fix it. The earliest I could even start to look at repairing the table was Sunday. Which would totally screw up our planned Friday evening gaming session at The Luxe. Hopefully it is just a matter of replacing the broken rivets with screws or bolts, and that no other damage was done.

Otherwise it had been a great evening of gaming.