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.