The nice thing about being Mr No Life, with no commitments is that when an impromptu gaming session is arranged you are free to partake. 

This was the case Sunday morning when Jonathan put a request up on the Fenland Gamers Facebook page asking who was free to play games that afternoon.

Our afternoons gaming started off with the fantasy themed worker placement game Simurgh. Or as I call it Dragonriders of Pern the boardgame. Which as an interesting (depends on your perspective) side note I’m listening to as my current audible book on my way to work and back.

I like worker placement games, and Simurgh is a really good example of the genre.

There’s a bit of setup, and the game takes up a lot of room.

Being able to decide the duration of the game is a nice touch. For our first play we naturally chose the short game option. Which was triggering the end game with either four objective tiles out or eight tiles in our chronicles.

Oh the choices you have to make while playing. Some really delicious ones. When and how many workers, and which ones to recall. Managing workers on the tiles in the wildes. Too many workers on a tile it gets moved to the chronicles and the game. No workers on it, yep goes to the chronicles.

You have resource management to look after. We had only fifteen slots to store our resources. Over flow and having to return the excess was an issue.

You have hand management to consider of your tiles. When do you play a tile to the wildes? Which one do you trash to make you? 

There is so much going on, it’s mind blowing fun.

When the main complaint about the game is the size of the player board needs to be bigger. Then you know that the game itself is a pretty solid game. The rule book is ok, although wording could be more consistent in places. 

Yeah I like this game a lot. Looking forward to playing it on its advanced Dragonlord setting, and getting its expansion.

For the record books, history and whoever Jonathan won by one point. It was a very close game.

Our next game was new arrival Hit Z Road.

The first thing that strikes you about Hit Z Road is it’s beautiful. The graphic style of a kind of fifties post apocalyptic fallout scavenged world just looks amazing. It looks and feels like they really did scavenge the bits together to make the game. 

The bidding phase of a round is a trap waiting for seasoned gamers to fall into. Waiting for them to over spend to get first player advantage and first choice of route to take. Eating up valuable and scarce resources.

The combat is light, simple and relies on resources to fuel it. Like spending bullet tokens to get dice to attack zombies from a distance before having to engage them in melee combat. Which you can escape by spending fuel tokens. The dice you roll in melee is decided by how many survivors you have. But extra damage can be done by spending adrenaline tokens when the appropriate dice faces appear.

This is a really nice light zombie game that plays quickly. Love it. And thanks to Jonathan and his survivors getting eaten by zombies I won,

We finished off the afternoons gaming with Grifters.

Set in the same Dsystopian universe as Resistance and Coup this new card game just sent out to backers is a nice card game with a cool mechanic.

That mechanic being a cool down period after playing cards. So you play a powerful card for its effect or combo of cards to complete one of the available criminal contracts they then are lost to you as the go through your HQ (the cool down).

This isn’t up to The Manhattan Project Chain Reaction level of card games. But it’s still pretty good.

It was a game I wasn’t sure how it’d work or play when reading the rules, but once you start playing it did click into place, and made sense.

And future history books will record that I beat Jonathan.

A great afternoon gaming. Thanks Jonathan for organising.