Rubium with a View

Bracknell Branch Reports:

Due to silly work commitments the regular Tuesday nights games session had changed to Monday night. Sitting at my dinner table in the day a thought popped into my head that I hadn't bought any new games recently. After a brief unsatisfactory interaction with the resident game board geeks in my local games shop I returned home with GNN favourite "Hey that's my fish" and new title Nexus Ops. I'd had a hankering to obtain a direct conflict game to offset all these lovely balanced euro games where everyone/thing gets on fabulously. There are plenty out there but it's sci-fi theme appealed to me. The reviews highlighted that it might not be everyones cup of tea, as it involved a fair amount of dice rolling and was played over a hex board, but coming from a war-games background this was no put off for me.

After two quick fun games of HTMF where honours were equal (Chris 53 Paul 46, Paul 50 Chris 48) the main feature of Nexus Ops was broken out. At first the box size seemed at odds with the contents as three sheets of game board and chits, two packs of cards and six dice spilled out. However after further inspection a satisfying wedge of playing pieces was stored under the insert. My worry of this game being a rule fest was quickly eased as we discovered them to be very well thought out and easy to take in. There are a lot of variations to this game but they can be mixed and matched to taste on top of the classic game. The basis of Nexus Ops is to achieve either the annihilation of your opponents or to gain a set number of victory points. The confrontation takes place over an ugly changeable hex board where you deploy either your warriors to win battles and collect victory points or miners who collect the mineral Rubuim which can be exchanged for more troops or miners. There are a bunch of restrictions and advantages for every unit and all of them can fight. It plays a little like the best elements from Small World and Risk; although that might not be a favourable comparison.

Pros - Fast play, easy rules, nice components, lots of variations.

Cons - Ugly board, dice (although not masses), can get a little repetitive, a little bit of referring each turn to start with. 

Anyway with a late start we had to bring proceedings to a close early with me winning 8 VP's to 6.

I liked it. It was what I was looking for when I bought Small World only to be disappointed by its awful conflict and deployment mechanic. Apparently it really comes into its own with 3 or 4 players, but I don't have those, so sucks to be me yeah?