Yesterday I put the “can anyone come out to play?” post up on the Fenland Gamers Facebook page to try and find someone to play a couple of two player games with.

Odin’s Ravens had just arrived, and Sun Tzu had been with me for a week. I was eager to play both.

Luckily Jonathan said he would be free once he had completed his chores. So a time was set for us to meet up at Costa.

Jonathan was already there when I arrived. So beverages bought we setup to play our first game of the afternoon Odin’s Ravens.

For such a simple game there are a remarkable number of decisions to make during the game.

The first being what mix of cards to draw to make your initial hand of five cards. How many Loki cards (special one use cards that give you a power up of some kind) do you draw, and how many landscape cards (cards that allow you to move).  You also get to repeat this decision at the end of each turn when you draw three new cards.

You then have the decision during the game of when to play those Loki cards. You only have a limited number for the whole game, and once used are out of the game.

Then when you do decide to play your Loki card you then have to decide which of the cards two abilities you will use. Will you use the one that helps you or the one that puts a spanner in your opponents plans. 

The art work is really nice on the cards. 

Jonathan and I both really liked the game. And that’s despite Jonathan winning by the skin of his teeth. 

Our second game was Sun Tzu. We played with the beginners variant. Which means with all 21 army figures, no Warlord cards, and the +2 and +3 removed from the game.

Before playing I had wondered why you would ever want to play the -1 card. But during play the lightbulb switched on. 

This is a game of differences. I liked that you had a hand of base cards to call upon each turn, which were then supplemented by one time use more powerful cards. I also liked that you could only use the number 6 card once in each of the areas you are fighting over.

I also liked that at the end of a turn you draw two cards, choose one and place the other at the bottom of your draw pile.

There is a fair amount of decision making and trying to second guess your opponent. Like when to play your more powerful cards and where.  Which I liked. 

For a tenner from The Works this is a nice little two player territory control game. For the history books I totally beat Jonathan’s armies to get an undisputed points victory. 

We finished off our game session with a two player game of The Manhattan Project: Chain Reaction. We’d played a three player game as our first game. Now I wanted to see how it faired as a two player game.

In our game I’d taken an early lead and built on it by building two bombs worth four points each. Jonathan jumped back into the running by building a seven point bomb. I was thinking about how to get another bomb built for the win, when I remembered I didn’t need to. All I needed to do was load a bomber for two points and get the win. It was a much simpler task to do that than build a third bomb. Quicker too. It took me one more turn to do this and win after I’d figured out this plan.

I really liked Chain Reaction as a two player game. It worked very well. This is proving to be a great card game.

I’ll close this post today with an image I put out on Instagram (which then gets pushed out to Facebook and Twitter) of part of my game library.