Lords of the Stone Age

Today’s plan for the same game to be played in two venues at once, with messages flying back and forth was slightly scuppered when it was revealed that Joe had lent out his copy of Ascending Empires. And also there isn’t really enough down-time during a two-player game to muck about with instant messaging or texts.

In the end the two factions went their separate ways. I believe that Joe and Steve went for A Few Acres Of Snow – a two player game that Joe has been itching to get people to play. Since two-player games aren’t leaderboard (at least, not usually), Sam felt in a co-operative mood and we chose Reiner Knizia’s re imagining of The Lord Of The Rings for our opening game.

I’d played it fairly recently, so I refreshed Sam’s memory of the rules, and we got stuck in. For most of the game, it was plain sailing, with Sauron barely twitching until Helm’s Deep, at which point he dragged himself a couple of spaces in our direction. Heading into Mordor, we had plenty of shields and I was confident of a successful campaign against the rabbit-eared monolith.

However, Sauron didn’t gain his reputation for evil for no reason, and in the last round, we went from comfort and confidence to panicky fear after a string of event tiles were turned over. Mordor is very deceptive: it’s events are bad, but they’re quite easy to avoid, and so you aren’t too bothered when the next event is uncovered. But this is a false sense of security. Each event takes you closer to Sauron’s victory, and we soon found ourselves standing one space away from defeat and two spaces away from absolute victory. It all depended on the turn of one tile.

An event tile... Sauron won. And he barely moved all game.

While the game was exciting while it lasted, and we couldn’t believe our luck with dice rolls, the end is a bit of a damp squib. Still, it was nice to team up with a fellow GNN regular and battle a common foe. I mean, one who isn’t Adam, that is.

For our next game we chose Stone Age as a nice two-player. Although I never win at this game any more, I still enjoy it. It feels very Roulette-ish, with the placement of the pieces and the element of luck. And I have to admit I had quite a bit of luck. By my standards, I played a very good game – getting my highest score by far. But Sam is not a man to be taken lightly at this game. Any confidence I had at my score was obliterated at Sam racked up the highest two-player score so far (sorry, Chris. I just couldn’t stop him).

Sam 337
Andrew 249

I'll leave it for Joe to explain his adventures in the snow with Steve in another post.