Friday Night Bunfight

More Eclipse rules played wrong:

III tiles should be limited by number of players

Discovery tiles must be assigned immediately (i.e. not 'cashed in' later)

Plasma cannons missiles are one-use-only!!!

Hexes may be discarded if you don't like the look of them - though your Explore action is over. 

This latter one is, as Andrew and I noted, kind of weird - "I'll come back later, when that planet has gone".

These anomalies came to light after Chris trounced us at Eclipse last night. I was hoping we'd be playing The Voyages of Marco Polo, but it didn't arrive. Instead we sallied forth into the firmament, built ships and fired missiles. Not for the first time, I felt that the game ended too soon: we'd only just started interacting. But that's more about how we choose to play rather than the game itself. I'm thinking next time I might go aggressive earlier, just to see how that pans out. My worry with three is whoever isn't involved in the fighting will end up winning...

Anyway we all built some mighty fine ships, Chris' were the mighty finest and in resplendent yellow, they marched unstoppably to the central hex. Both Andrew and I offered token resistance, but as we all know, you don't get victory points for tokens in Eclipse. 

My dice-rolling was awful again - I did roll a double 6, but that was on behalf of The Ancients - and my dreadnoughts collapsed like papier mache umbrellas in a typhoon, their seeming impregnability undone by time. Andrew's nest of wasps strategy (lots of tiny spaceships) turned out to be sturdier, but not sturdy enough:

Chris 36

Andrew 25

Sam 25

With that beast out of the way, it was only just gone 10pm. On a Friday! I brought out a selection of short games, and we ended up playing all of them!

First up was Raj. I won the first round, Chris the second. At that point Andrew - courtesy of some brutal ties - was left in the dust score wise, lagging back on zero points with Chris and I at 41 v 45. But Andrew staged a comeback in round three with an impressive 31 points. I snagged the win, despite wasting my 15 bids twice:

Sam 57

Chris 44

Andrew 31 

Then we played FUSE. This is a co-operative dice game of defusing bombs, against the clock. You only have ten minutes and must quickly assign rolled dice to cards. Renegade Games supply a timer which clicks away in the background. There's an annoying voice you can thankfully switch off. We played two training missions (i.e. the easiest level) and lost the first one, but won the second with a minute to spare. It's fun; there's a definite sense of pressure. 

After that we had a couple of games of Push It. By this time Andrew's saki was doing its work and I'd broken the whisky out. Chris had a coffee, but it didn't do him any favours:

Sam 11

Chris 9

Andrew 8

The next game was even tenser, with Andrew and I paired on ten points as Chris attempted to surge back from four points behind us:

Sam 11

Andrew 10

Chris 9 

Finally we played Take It Easy, this time all three of us choosing the same call: boardgames! Very meta. It was interesting how we interpreted our experiences of game-playing into a narrative of three numbers: 9-4-2 starts well, fades away. 1-7-6: never ask to play it, enjoy when we do. Andrew's 1-2-3 was Quartermaster General.

Andrew 541

Sam 525

Chris 432

So the evening ended with the Bristolians exacting some small measure of revenge on Chris, sailing in here with his dastardly Chippenham ways. See you on Tuesday guys.