From Stone to Chrome

Imagine the scene. A prehistoric landscape. A tribe of hunter gatherers are tracking wildebeest for food. Suddenly there’s a rippling in the space-time continuum and, with senses alert, the Neanderthals are able to make out the words “Fucking Hell!!” drifting towards them from across the millennia.

That would be Quentin, who took a while to get his flicking skills under control this evening, for half the table had chosen Ascending Empires as one of the games of the evening. There were seven of us – six regulars plus a new face to be carved on the Games Night News mountainside: Andy. We split into groups of four and three. The four of us (myself, Joe, Quentin and Steve) chose gleaming hi-tech Ascending Empires. Sam and Adam taught Andy the joys of Stone Age. I’ll leave it to them to give a fuller report of Andy’s debut in the comments. Meanwhile, these were the scores:

Adam 145
Sam 123
Andy 120

With two old hands (Steve and Joe) and two newbies (me and Quentin) the rules of AE were quickly explained before we set off into the galaxy. At first it was a very cordial affair until I made the mistake of choosing to approach an un-colonized planet in Quentin’s quadrant. He took this to be an act of agression and so swiftly landed on the planet in question. Somewhat offended, I instead took a poorly defended planet of his, which then escalated into a war between the two of us, with neither wishing to lose face by backing down, yet also both of us aware that Joe and Steve were doing somewhat better than us.

Steve started well and stayed that way. He even had time to offer me advice, and also casually give away the colour of a still-to-be-identified planet. By the end of the game he had a big spaceship and it would’ve been more effective with more accurate flicking. But it was Joe who really suffered from “twitch-finger”. He spent two whole turns trying to land two ships on a barely-defended planet of Quentin’s but only succeded in going around it in eccentric orbits until Steve came along and calmly shot him out of the sky.

When the game ended, Steve was a clear winner with Joe a relatively comfortable second. I credit my third place to mining, which is all I could do in between fighting off hordes of Quentin’s space fighters. Quentin came fourth, but proclaimed that he’d enjoyed the evening. I also enjoyed Ascending Empires, but for such a fast moving game, it’s quite long, and I found it a little tiresome towards the end. Perhaps I was just battle-weary. But Joe’s comedy flicking is certainly worth seeing.

Steve 30
Joe 20
Andrew 18
Quentin 14

The Stone Age had long since passed by the time we’d ended Ascending Empires, and they’d managed to squeeze in a game of Tsuro.

Sam
Andy/Adam

With time running out beofre the end of the season, you have to say that Adam has it all wrapped up at the top. Meanwhile, Steve takes the hotly disputed 7th place from Jonny while Andy crashes in at number 9.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Adam	23	111	4.86
Sam	25	103.5	4.14
Joe	19	78	4.11
Andrew	23	75.5	3.28
Hannah	10	44.5	4.45
Quentin	9	37.5	4.17
Steve	9	33	3.67
Jonny	7	28	4
Andy	2	7	3.5
Paul	2	6.5	3.25
Chris	2	5.5	2.75
Sally	1	3.5	3.5
Matilda	1	1.5	1.5