Last night was an adhoc gaming session to play Fields of Green that I had organised earlier in the week.

I like our new hosts, especially on the Friday evenings. I have tea with Mum before hand then have dessert (usually sticky toffee pudding with custard) at our hosts before the others turn up. Although others do also turn up and have food before hand as well.

Over at Sutton Bridge they have started three months of works (what exactly they are doing I have no idea) on the bridge, reducing it to a single lane.

The reason I’m mentioning this is despite being miles from Wisbech and Wisbech St Mary it did have a big impact on our gaming session!

Basically it meant lots more traffic going through Wisbech, so long queues. Plus the obvious long queues at the bridge itself, and rat runs. This meant that one or two attending were delayed by being caught up in this traffic chaos.

Three months of this.

Whilst waiting for those fighting their way through the traffic chaos Jonathan and I set up our respective games ready to start upon arrival.

In the meantime with Julie there as well we played a couple of games of Batman Love Letter.

I don’t know what weird alternative universe we went to. But Jonathan won both games. The first without Julie and myself taking a point. Jonathan never does this well at Love Letter.

Once Jeff and Mandy arrived, and had eaten. Julie, Jeff, Mandy and myself played a four player game of Fields of Green. Whilst Jonathan and Colin played a two player game of Railways of the World using the Mexico map.

Playing Fields of Green at the full player count meant we were drafting cards the regular way of choosing a card, and passing the remaining cards to our left or right depending on the round direction. I like this mechanic. It’s used well here. It has that 7 Wonders feel, but with farming!

It was close whether the table we were using was going to be big enough. It barely was. This game takes up lots of space.

One change I made from the rules was instead of a pile of equipment tiles on the table to draw from I used a spare Spirits of the Forest tile bag I had instead. I think this works better. Especially with limited table space.

We also for this game used the rulebooks suggestions on which piles and number of cards to draw each round. A nice touch for players new to the game. Although I had played once before, the other three hadn’t. So it made sense to do this.

As you can see I narrowly didn’t come last. Jeff and Mandy drew on points. So it was to the tie breakers to see if we could determine a winner. The first tie breaker was most locations in their farm. Which Mandy had. So was declared the victor. That’s back to back victories in the two games I’ve played with Mandy now.

Finally, one of these posts wouldn’t be one of these posts without the photographic talents of Jonathan closing it off. Here’s Johnny…

About two weeks ago Jonathan sought players to play Search for Planet X.

I was one of those that were interested in trying the game.

With enough people interested in playing a four player game a date and time was set, tutorials and apps linked to.

Last night was the agreed day for playing the game.

Jonathan and I met up about an hour earlier than the planned time to play the two player game Mr Jack.

I’d never played Mr Jack before.

We played the game twice. In the first game I was the detectives trying to identify and capture Mr Jack played by Jonathan. Then in the second game the roles were reversed and Jonathan was trying to capture my Mr Jack.

I really liked this two player deduction game. And not just because I won both games.

Our first game was longer than the second. But I did manage to capture Mr Jack. Whilst I won the second game with a great bit of misdirection and had Jonathan arresting the wrong character.

I do like how which character is Mr Jack is selected randomly at the start of each game by drawing a character tile.

I like the way actions/characters are chosen each round, and how it flips each round. So the detectives may choose first at the start of a round, then Mr Jack chooses twice, leaving the detectives one tile to play. Then it gets reversed next round. This is so tactical, especially if you need a particular character and you don’t get a chance to chose it before the other player. This happened twice in our second game. Jonathan kept choosing the character I needed to get an even earlier win!

I like how the number of lamp posts gets reduced during the early rounds. It makes the deduction harder. As apart from the Sherlock character and Watson they are the only way to eliminate suspects.

Yeah a nice game. Could easily see it added to the collection. It’s gone on the wish list.

After a small delay to the agreed time for playing the Search for Planet X we started playing.

Another game I really liked.

Now we know where I stand on games that are only playable with an app. I’ve rant lots about it in the past. I’ll happily play them but I won’t own them! Unless there is a way to play without the app.

Search for Planet X currently doesn’t play without an app. It works really well with the app. The app is put to great use providing clues.

This is a logic game pure and simple. Using clues given to you in the app based on the type of action you performed you deduce which sector Planet X is. You can see the starting clues I had in the photo above.

During our game I knew the planet could be in one of two sectors. After Jonathan revealed where the dwarf planet was in a peer review I knew exactly where it was. I just wasn’t sure what was on one side of it.

For me this game was a game of misplays! Well two to be precise. The first was playing the correct tile in the wrong sector. I misread my sheet. That cost me 4 points.

The second was forgetting I had to say what was either side of the sector with Planet X in. Which meant I was guessing one sector. That got compounded by forgetting there were only two empty sectors, and I’d already identified them! So there couldn’t have been a third.

That gave Jonathan a window to guess himself. Well he was kinda forced to. He knew I’d guess it my next turn. Luck was on his side. He guessed right.

Despite having worked out where Planet X was FIRST I came last. My mistakes were my undoing.

With the games played last night another two new to me games were added to the challenge.

I’m beginning to think I might have set the target for this challenge too low!

It’s insane or so I thought to have already played 13 new to me games in two months. I might have to revisit this and set a new larger target number.

If my fading memory hasn’t let me down I think I might have just looked at the last two years numbers before deciding on the target for this challenge.

Maybe I should have looked further back. But I think my thought process at the time was “who knows what this year will be like? The pandemic is still on-going.” So I decided to look at just the numbers for during the previous two year of the pandemic as my guideline.

I certainly think at the current rate of play the numbers I achieved in 2018/2019 are certainly achievable.

And here we are at the end of the post and the photos taken by Jonathan.

Earlier in the week I had an epiphany whilst walking upstairs!

“Why if I’d rather play Dune Imperium every time when given a choice over Lost Ruins of Arnak should I keep Lost Ruins in my collection?”

I even shared this insight on Instagram (which then pumped it out to the other “big” two social media platforms).

Now don’t get me wrong, I really like Lost Ruins. It’s just I like Imperium more. I’ll still happily play Lost Ruins.

This is Inis all over again for me. I enjoyed Inis. But there were three games in my collection that I’d rather play over it if given a choice. So I sold it on.

Was this the time to do the same with Lost Ruins?

Naturally I got some blow back from those that preferred Lost Ruins over Imperium. But their opinion on the matter was undermined considerably by the fact they liked “not a game” Barenpark.

But it was Diego’s reply that sealed Lost Ruins fate in my collection. All he said was if I did decide to sell it he was interested.

So we chatted at work about the game. I came up with an asking price I thought was fair for the base game and expansion that I was selling to a friend. I don’t like ripping friends off. Diego agreed with the price, and a deal was struck.

That little bit of business was concluded at last nights fortnightly meet up. Where goods were exchanged for cash.

We split into three tables. Jonathan leading one of them with Pandemic. And Diego had the other with Potion Explosion (a game I’d like to try).

The game I was playing and with who was decided earlier in the week on our discord server.

Dune Imperium with the newly released first expansion The Rise of Ix was our main game of the evening.

We played with three of the new leaders (you can see who played which below).

Wow! I loved Dune Imperium before. But this expansion. Wow!

First off more intrigue cards, more leaders, more conflict cards, more Imperium cards, and for solo/2 players more House Hagal cards. More variety on that side is so so welcome with any expansion. Plus we definitely got to see some of the new cards during the game.

I liked my leader Tessia Vernius. To make use of her ability I really did have to progress on all the influence tracks.

An early tech tile had an end game scoring where I could get a victory point if I had at least 3 influence on all four influence tracks. So I leant heavily into progressing up the influence tracks. That victory point might be the difference between winning and losing. Scores are so tight in this game.

By leaning so heavily into the influence tracks I managed to get 3 out of the 4 faction alliances. Taking into account the earlier victory points for getting 2 influence on a track, 7 points of my final score came from the influence tracks.

Below you can see the 9th rounds conflict card that gave me the final 2 victory points needed to trigger the end of the game. If Julie hadn’t accidentally blocked me with her final action I would have had enough spice to get another victory point. But that’s being greedy.

I do feel that these new leaders you have to lean heavily into their abilities. For example I don’t think Julie was aggressive enough and winning enough combats. She was the first to get a dreadnought but didn’t get the second. I think only one of her victory points was from combat!

I love the new interstellar shipping spot. What a great addition. Plus it makes getting Solari much much harder by removing the sell spice action. So getting the third agent/swordsman is much more of an effort to do. Still necessary but harder. Plus to get the more powerful action spot you need 2 influence with the spacing guild. Making the influence track more important.

I like the tech tiles. I ended up with 3 in the end. One early one as I said above synergised really well with my leader.

Dreadnoughts very cool. I like what they bring to the table for combat. Probably the lesser of the three new changes to the game. But still pretty good.

Our game made it 9 rounds before I grabbed victory and control of Arrakis.

I really like what Rise of Ix brings to Dune Imperium. Can’t wait to play it again. I’d love to try the new Epic game variant in the rulebook. Plus using the official Direwolf app there are two further variants! to try.

After my glorious victory Diego’s table and ours joined together to play Perudo.

It was fun to get this to the table again. It was “too noisy” for our previous hosts. No such restriction here.

In the end it came down to a head to head showdown between Diego and myself. My two dice to his one. Then it was one a piece. But for once I was able to pull off a win. Historically if memory doesn’t fail me, more often than not I’ve lost more than I’ve won in these stand offs.

Back to back wins! It truly was a good evenings gaming for me. So I called it a day while I was ahead! Plus I’d told mum I’d be back by about 9:30pm.

No photos from Jonathan, however we do have a new photographic correspondent from last night and now proud owner of Lost Ruins of Arnak, Diego!