Civilization with dice

It's been a busy month with work and home but a few games have been played. I was lucky enough to get Endeavour and Roll Through the Ages last week as presents. Endeavor looks amazing and it should get its first play tomorrow night. RTtA has been played and I am pretty impressed.
i haven't yet played its grown up companion but there is a very good game lurcking in the small box.
First play was against Dobbie and we quickly started rolling the lovely wooden dice. I went for getting a few early developments while Dobbie wanted more cities and the great wall of China. the dice were rolled and after 30 mins I checked over the winning conditions. First to 5 developments, wait up I have 7 already. Ooops. Dobbie had finished his great wall so we decided to have two more rounds then score. We both then went for pure score with me finishing a hanging gardens while Dobbie went for everything else.
I won 33 to 27, Dobbie would have won but he had more disasters than me.

I am going to give it another play tomorrow but first impressions were very good. there is a free expansion available for it as well that adds a bit more meat to it, but I think I can live without that for a bit.

I have also finished painting the robots from my Robo Rally set. They look pretty good, so I will post some pics of them soon. Until then, I need to re-read the Endeavor rules as I don't want to miss the game end conditions on that one.

My Brain hurts!

Last night I played Neuland and it was painful. Don't get me wrong I enjoyed it but it was certainly a thinking game and one that we struggled to get our heads around.
After a few rounds we had grasped the mechanics of the game, but were no where near knowing how to win the game.

It's a very clever game of resource and time manipulation. You have to use your workers to produce resources to then convert resources so that you can build bigger resource processing building. Each action takes time and the more actions you take the longer it will be until your next turn.
I screwed up my last go and left it wide open for Hannah to win, next time I really must pay more attention to the other players workers on the board.

After that brain draining game we finished off with a quick game of Ubongo. I started out strong but failed to beat the others so two game losses for me.

Other gaming in the week has been Pitchcar with my kids and there friends which was really good. They are getting pretty good at it, but tend to flick a bit hard at times causing there cars to shoot off the track. Plus a bit of Carc and Catan on the 360 against Gornad which has been good.

Pandemic expansion is released next week and I am really looking forward to that one, I hope its going to add some great bits to the game.

On a side note, Monopoly has released an online version that uses google maps as the board. So far the servers are being absolutely hammered, but keep trying if you want to buy your road.

Moooooo!!

Another mini games night this week and the expansion to Kingsburg made an appearance. To Forge a Realm is really 5 mini expansions all of which are pretty good and add to the base game. We played with the soldier tokens expansion and it did add to the game. I was determined to keep the 4 point token to the end to help scoring so went for a military strategy and built as many +battle buildings as I could. I started out well with Gornad in the lead by a couple of points, but the others caught up. At the last round things were very close and even closer at the end when 3 of us tied for first place, what was worse was we had all spent our goods for extra soldiers in the last winter battle. So the game ended with a tie, but it was a good game.

Dominion was also played, this time with no Intrigue cards mainly because carrying two boxes around is a bit painful. I thin I need to invest in a carry box that I can use to transport a couple of decks around. My economic engine stalled and I always seemed to end up with 7 gold, never enough to buy a province.

the night ended with a game of Mow, its French for Moo! Its a clever card game where players build up herds of cows and try to not pickup the cow cards with flies on it. It's similar to 6 Nimt but maybe a little less stressful.

Another mini session is organised for next week, so plenty of gaming is happening at the moment which makes a change.

Please sir, can I have some more?

It has been a pretty good few days game wise, Pitchcar was played with the kids on Sunday and the 2 games we played were very close. Each was won by mistakes, or a bad flick on the last lap. Pitchcar is a fun game and its so easy to just setup and get going. I must have a look at the expansions some time, the ramp expansion looks like it could be fun.

Last night I visited Mudnoney's for a few games, we had arranged to give Dominion a go with some of the Intrigue cards. I have had Intrigue for over a month now and not played it. We used one of the suggested setups and it was a very strange game. A bit slow as there were few opportunities to make money. Or we missed them. Some of the new cards are just mean, the Torturer gives the other players a choice of either discarding 2 cards or taking a curse. Used with a throne room it was very nasty. I managed to win the game by just burning through the estate cards and finishing off the remodel pile. I enjoyed it, but did feel it went on a little longer than usual, but there were new cards to read.

Next up was Agricola, playing with the "I" deck. It was a good game and I lost out by 5 points in the end. I made a stupid mistake in the first round and couldn't feed my family so picked up my first ever begging card. things trundled along for a bit but Mudhoney played a summer house card for 8 points at the end securing a big points advantage. It was a good, close game and other than the begging problem I wasn't sure what else I could have done to win.

Lastly we played Cant Stop, something a bit lighter to end the evening. I am usually very bad at luck games and things started out badly. I just couldn't stop and lost everything for the two rounds. My typical fare, but I came back strong going for the 5-6-7-8 columns and just kept on rolling. I managed to score the win but it was a close one with the others each finishing on two columns as well.

No more gaming is planed for the next few days, so it will be back to Stone Age on Yucata. But we were discussing holding a Formula D tournament with the group, that could be fun.

The Dice Tower Awards

The 2008 Dice Tower Awards were revealed last week. For those of you that don't know the Dice Tower is a podcast hosted by Tom Vassal and covers board and card games. It's a good listen with some good humour and lots of information on new and old games.

This year I was asked to be on the panel and I jumped at the offering. After the initial selections were made we all had to vote on the different categories. I managed to get plays in on most of the games in the categories which helped out.

Anyway, the categories and winners are

• Best Game of the Year , Dominion
• Small Publisher of the Year, Fragor Games for Snow Tails
• Best New Designer, Donald Vaccarino for Dominion
• Best Reprint, Formula D
• Most Innovative, Space Alert
• Best Expansion, Descent : Road to Legend
• Best Artwork, Battlestar Gallactica
• Best Family Game, Formula D
  

I am pretty happy with the games that won, they are all good games and ones that I enjoy playing. I think Dominion was going to win Best Game hands down, its one of my favorite games of the year and I haven't even used any of my Intrigue cards yet.

Formula D also did very well, its another good game that has benefited from the reprint. I wanted it to win Best Artwork as well but Battlestar is a worthy winner.

Gaming has been a little light at the moment, but a session has been planned for next week so hopefully some new games will hit the table. I am dying to give Dominion: Intrigue a play, so we shall see.

El Grande

A mini meet was held last night as I wanted to give El Grande a go. I recently picked it up as its in the top ten games on the geek and looked pretty good. After reading the rules earlier in the week I thought it looked like a very basic game and one that I was surprised had such a high rating.

Anyway, four of us sat down and started the game off, after the second round we realised something was wrong. We were playing the power cards wrong so started again. This started off well for me and even better in round 2 when I was able to bid the highest and use an action card to score a whopping 27 points. This put me well in the lead. for the rest of the game it was a race for second place. I think I finished on around 135 points, a very good game. Simple but very well thought out.

My luck turned for the next game, Mow is a card game about flies and cowes. Its all about playing numbered cards in order and not being unable to place a card. Its a fun game that is very easy to pickup and play. I came last after three appalling rounds where I picked up between 30 and 40 flies.

With an hour to go I pulled out a few games to choose and Blokus was picked. Four player Blokus is a very good game and one I enjoy playing. Lost the first game and won the second with only a single 3 point piece left that I was unable to play.

A diverse mix of games, area control abstract and flies. El Grande stood out and I was really impressed with it. Price point is maybe a bit high but it did come with 5 expansions so there is plenty of game play in the box.

Noticed that the Kingsburg expansion has just been released so that on a wish list, also the new Middle Earth Quest game has appeared out of nowhere. That needs a bit of a look to see what its all about. But above all the expansion for Pandemic is slated for this month and that's a must buy.

A game of musical chairs

We had a POB meet last night although there were only eight of us we still managed to get in a good number of hours play.

First up was Space Alert a game that I have been interested in for a while. It's a co-op game where the players work as a team to stop there space craft from being destroyed by alien ships. The novel factor of the game is that you play along to a mission CD. This is telling you what phase of the game you are in and when enemies attack. While this android voice was talking we were frantically trying to plan out our moves. These included firing lasers, powering up shields and wiggling the mouse to stop the computer going into screen saver mode. When the mission CD ends you all end up with a series of programmed moves that you then play out.
Space alert is one of the most frantic and stressful games I have played in a while. It was like watching an episode of Laurel and Hardy as we bumbled our way around the ship shooting at baddies that hadn't appeared then moving off while someone else moving into position to find that laser had run out of power. Teamwork wasn't our thing and we lost.
I really enjoyed the game and look forward to giving it another play sometime.

The other table had finished cutthroat caverns so we rejoined and Game of Thrones was pulled out. I have only played this game once and was sorely beaten by Steerpike. I suppose life in the castle had turned him into a Lannister and his red troops had won the game by turn 3 of my first game.
Tonight was different, 5 players and we were all ready. Unfortunately Squid boy managed to sink my navy in the first turn and subsequently took over house Lannisters ancestral home the following turn. Meanwhile Ollie and Rob were expanding in the south and Mike's Starks were pouring down from the north. I was sandwiched between two fronts and had to spend more time defending than expanding.
The game drew on and it was obvious that it was either going to be Ollie or Mike to take the win. In the end they both finished with the same number of strongholds but Ollie had the higher supply so won the game.
The game had run for nearly 3 hours and it was gone midnight so we packed up.

A good nights gaming, the other table had played a couple of games of Race for the Galaxy during our epic battle of Westeros. I am not sure when a Game of Thrones will be played again, it takes a while to play but I am hoping it won't be as long as last time.