Another mid week Fenland Gamers gaming session took place this evening. Tonight it was Mat selecting the games that we would be playing.

The evening started off with the game Rattus.

This game is set during medieval times (?) with plague invested rats sweeping across Europe. The aim of the game is to have the most cubes (I think they represent people) left on the board at the end of the game.

This game took a little getting into, maybe three turns before it clicked properly and I started thinking of tactics. I'm not sure how you would describe the genre. So I'm not going to attempt to categorise it.

Mat won the game comfortably. While Jonathan and I drew for last place. Mind you Jonathan and I spent a lot of the game duking it out for getting our cubes onto the only safe space on the board. Leaving Mat alone in reality to build up his winning population.

I enjoyed the game, but I think I need another game or two to make a final decision to see if it makes it onto my wish list. But even if it didn't make the list, I'd be more than happy to play the game on other occasions. It's an enjoyable game.

Next up was the worker placement game Russian Railroads.

This game has lots and lots of tokens! While Mat was setting up, Jonathan and I joked about how the game designers came to have so many tokens with such lines as “you know what's missing from the game? More tokens”.

When you first see the board and your player tableau it does look a little daunting. However game knowledge from other worker placement games soon kicks in speeding up the learning curve. After watching the others take their turn, and then taking mine everything was on familiar ground, with just the odd question over particular symbols, or placement of stuff.

There are some nice touches to the game. Like buying engineers that give you exclusive actions to take on a turn. Having multiple development tracks that you have to decide between developing, adds a nice little tactical decision making to your choices.

The end of round scoring seemed like a mysterious thing to Jonathan and myself. Luckily Mat was familiar with the dark art. Although I don't think it helped making Mat laugh a couple of times when he was scoring putting him off.

And boy do you score points. I think my final score was 287!!! Mat was over 200, and Jonathan was well over 150. Racking the points up is insane. I got 40 points at the end for collecting four engineers. At the end of a round you can easily be score 20 points or more. Then you get multipliers kicking in. It's crazy.

I really did enjoy this game, and not just because I won. There is a nice depth to this game, and worker placement games are becoming one of my favourite game genres.

I hope when we finally get Lords of Waterdeep to the table that it lives up to the others expectations. I love the game but sometimes a game can become bigger than the actually game is in the imagination. Then when you play the game it doesn't quiet live up to the hype and expectations. So no pressure!

Another great evening of gaming. I'm looking forward to the next one.

Posted by me using my iPad and the Blogsy app