August will see me hopefully back in full time employment! Assuming everything between now and then goes to plan.

Which means I was spreading the good news to my fellow fenland gamers at the weekly Friday Evening gaming sessions at The Angel Inn.

If Debbie had arrived earlier we would have had a first play of New York 1901. However Jo and I were just about to pack it away as she arrived because there would not have been enough time to play it before Jonathan was due to turn up.

Instead we ended up playing the classic Age of War. Debbie took an early lead, that was soon closed and over taken by Jo. For me it was another chance for the dice to continue showing their contempt and hate for me that they started on Wednesday at the monthly meetup. The dice even gave me a glimmer of hope of at least not coming last, but firmly shut that door in my face. Of course Jonathan and Jamie arrived just in time to help rub salt in the wound of being last.

We followed up my glorious defeat with a five player game of Forbidden Island. Yes we know it's four players maximum, something we “stumbled” upon half way through the game as it was kicking our collective butts. Now Jonathan had bought this game at the expo after being told off by his eldest daughter for having traded his previous copy away. I had a copy sitting in my pile of shame. So despite having been defeated by another Matt Leacock game, we did get three of the four treasures before the helicopter landing spot sunk. Plus it's one more game removed from my pile of shame.

Our final game of the evening was a new game to me from Dice Hate Me (and at the the moment they certainly do) called The Great Heartland Hauling Co. I really liked this pick up and delivery game.

You move your lorry either by spending cash, which in reality you want to avoid doing because this is also your victory points. Or by using any fuel cards in your hand. The nice touch is you can't mix and match cash and fuel cards to move. Plus fuel cards range in value from one to three. You have to move as the first thing you do. So if you don't have fuel cards it's going to cost you points. However you may not have enough fuel cards to get to where you want to go, so you may have to spend cash instead. But if you were going to sell, will you be making a loss because you spent cash to get there? Some lovely decisions to me made.

Then there is the buying and selling goods. To buy goods you need a card of that good you want to buy. And the reverse is true to sell it. However if the good isn't a “native” good to the location you are buying at the cost of buy a good goes up by one. So to say buy three pork/pigs you would need three pork/pig cards or if it is none native the most you would be able to buy would be two at the cost of four pork/pig cards. The reason for this is the max hand size you can have is five cards. In fact you will always have five cards, because at the end of your turn you draw back up to five cards.

Luckily selling isn't handicapped by the “native” rule of buying. If there is a market for your good at the location, you may sell as many goods as you have in stock and cards for. Add the money to your score and start plotting your next delivery.

Once some-one hits thirty points, the other players get one more turn and its game over. Any left over goods you have are negative points and get taken off, and the player left with the highest score wins. Which in our case was Debbie. But the good thing is I didn't come last in our game.

So with the great evening of gaming over. Jonathan and I grabbed a kebab from down Norfolk Street before saying our farewells. I then went off to scoff my kebab in my car before seeing the enjoyable new X-Men movie at The Luxe, and take the mickey out of Nath there for his tv appearance earlier in the week.

Overall a great end to a good week.

Posted by me using my iPad and the Blogsy app

It's been a real busy week, which has meant I'm behind in my rabblings about my rock n roll gaming life.

I'd missed Tuesday's gaming session at Chatteris. I'd made the call that I needed to spend the time finishing off my lesson for the following days one hour micro teach I was doing as part of an interview I'd had for a job of a localish college. The previous micro teach had been a bit of a flop because of the setup process of the software we were using for the lesson. But I'd been given a second bite of the cherry thanks to impressing enough during the interview I had. I didn't want to muck up this second chance.

Wednesday was the monthly meetup of the Fenland Gamers. I was feeling pretty good because I felt I had done a pretty good micro teach that morning. The extra prep had paid off.

The monthly meet was really well attended. We even had cookies from my official cake maker Doreen to devour while playing. And yes they were every bit as good as her scrumptious cakes. One day I hope Doreen comes along with Sam to get the standing ovation from the club she deserves. Oh and to try some cool games.

Because of the great turn out we split into two groups to play games.

In our group we started off playing King of Tokyo with the power up expansion. One of the bits of news, in fact the only bit from the UK Expo I heard about so far was the new fifth anniversary edition coming out of King of Tokyo. It's getting a make over of the art work, removing two monsters to make way for two new new ones. One of the new ones is the going to be the Space Penguin, which currently is very elusive and expensive to get, mainly due to having been a promo at events. So that market is gone. The card art is changing, including the back of card art, so no backwards compatibility with the current edition. Well on the cards you buy in game that is. However there are plans to release card sleeves so any promo cards you have can be used with the new edition. Plus there is talk of an “upgrade” kit of the new monsters that current owners can buy also. Iello also said that the upcoming King of New York Power Up expansion will have power up cards for both King of New York and the new edition of King of Tokyo. Which I think is a clever move. It gets the power up cards for the new monsters out there quickly, so people can play with the power up expansion. Which lets face it adds to the game greatly. The final improvement is that the rules have also been made easier to understand!

Back to our play of the game, Gavin managed to knock out Sam and myself at the same time. Leaving himself and Katie to fight it out for the title of King of Tokyo. I was cheering on Katie to revenge me.

Katie and Gavin traded blows, until Katie took a much deserved points victory that Gavin was unable to stop.

While we had been knocking several shades of excrement out of each other, and causing incalculable damage and deaths to Tokyo (who honestly would want to be King of the left over rubble?) the other group were teaching Ticket to Ride.

The gaming groups stayed the same. Our group went empire building with Nations the Dice Game, whilst the other group decided to try and save the world from four killer diseases in Pandemic the Cure.

I got my butt truly kicked at Nations. My dice really did hate me. I rolled hardly anything I could use. My very first action of the game was a reroll. As everyone else was building up their civilisation, getting extra and swapping dice, I was struggling to do anything. Katie totally ruled the game and took an early lead that the others struggled to keep in touch with. I wasn't even in the running.

Yeah I was last, with Sam coming in third and chuckling that she had beat me. Gavin got closer to Katie than I expected but she still romped home to victory.

Another great evening of gaming, amazing cookies, and great banter (I know the girls Debbie and Jo enjoyed Sam delivering me my come uppance on the banter side).

Posted by me using my iPad and the Blogsy app

We were once more going to be a man down for our Pandemic Legacy session on Wednesday, so we decided to turn it into an open gaming session to the members of The Fenland Gamers (which you can join for FREE either on the Facebook page or the clubs website).

Our evenings gaming started off with us playing 51st State Complete Master Set. Yes the theme isn't on Jonathan's top 1000 themes to play. But I thought he might like the mechanics.

After going over the rules from the excellent and humourous cheat sheet, we started playing. The game started off slow, maybe because we were all learning the game. No one was building much, or getting victory points. Jonathan was the first to score a point, and he held the lead right upto the end of the game to get (spoiler) the win. In fact I was the last to start scoring. However I did make a late dash to grab second place.

I think roughly the game took about one and half hours for us to play with four players. Which surprised me because from podcasts I'd heard talking about the game they were saying it played quicker than Imperial Settlers.

In this game there was very little razing other players buildings, I was the only one who did it, and that was a too late attempt to slow Jonathan's scoring engine. So were we not being aggressive enough?

It did seem to take a few rounds to get any sort of engine going. I made a lot of deals to bring in resources.

I do need to check the rules again, because none of us got shields. And we didn't spot any cards that gave us one either. So unless an expansion (included in the box) gave them, we were a bit confused how we got them. That also goes for the bulldozer token.

I do like Imperial Settlers (wish I could play it more often), so unsurprisingly I enjoyed playing 51st State. I liked the extra option when building of discarding a building already built of the same type, along with a brick. It allowed the more expensive to build building to be built more easily. A fact I remembered too late in the game. I like the different levels of raze cost of buildings based on position on the player board.

The components, art work, are fantastic. I feel it's very thematic. Love the humour in the rules.

After playing in a post apocalyptic world there is only one thing to do, play test a an aphid apocalypse based game for Jonathan! Jonathan and his design partner Rebecca are working on a co-operative pandemic influenced kids game set in the Ladybug Lunch (a previous kids card game of theirs) universe. But in this world instead of diseases you are trying to stop aphids taking over the flowers in your garden.

This was as a said a play test. A first in the UK. The game was over very very quickly. Jonathan was under the opinion that it was too hard for a kids game. My suggestion was to have a double sided board, a hard and easy side. It will be interesting to see if Jonathan and Rebecca run with that idea.

Our final game of the evening was Love Letter Batman, which I won, leaving Jonathan as the only one in the game that didn't score a point. Yes I had to point that out.

A great evening of gaming, I hope this got you interested in coming along to one of our gaming sessions.

Posted by me using my iPad and the Blogsy app