Back to Gaming

After a two week break enjoying the sights and sun of Spain I am ready for some gaming.

This week a couple of the guys came over as we had planned a game of Shogun. It was a great game, playing with 5 players is always my favorite number as it increases the conflicts.
A couple of the guys hadn't played it before but after the first year had been scored things were making sense. I was in the lead mainly down to being left alone to build in two regions while Panzerfaust started his warmongering ways.
Year two heated up with a few of us loosing provinces that were ready to supply us with gold for the season or further supplies. I came in second to Moley after he managed to take over enough provinces with buildings to score a good number of points. Well played, you managed to keep quite and just amass armies ready for a massive summer offensive.
I was a little disappointed in that we all managed to keep our peasants under control and feed during the winter months. It always adds a bit of tension when players start loosing badly defended provinces due to lack of rice.
Everyone enjoyed it and all agreed we should setup another game sometime.

Next up was the bean farming game Bonhanza. This has been on my shelf for a while now as I was never that sure about it. I had read the rules before going on holiday and watched a couple of web videos on how to play.
I explained the rules, ran through a couple of dummy hands and it seemed to make sense. The cards were dealt and after a couple of hesitant rounds it clicked. Stink beans were soon being traded for Chili beans and the game started to flow nicely. Unfortunately it was getting late so we decided to just play through one run of the deck. Romeo won and surprisingly everyone was very keen to play it again another night. I had just worked out some strategies and realised that you really had to trade away cards from your hand so you could plant and harvest your own. Then the game ended. Next time things will be different.

Games on there way are El Grande and Mow, probably two extremes. One set in ancient Spain where players vie for control over Spain's provinces, the other a french game about cows and flies.

Game group meet soon and a Game of Thrones is planned, just need to read the rules again and maybe get some strategy tips from Steerpike ;-)