Ian's Sheep is Exhausted

Wednesday night. After missing the last three (three!!!) Tuesdays, Chris and I agreed to play a post-football game. Ian also joined us, making the trek from Easton for a ludicrous 10pm start!

We played a game I backed on Kickstarter earlier in the year: Tribes: Early Civilisation. This is by the designer of Nations, so it came with some pedigree. Unlike Nations though, it plays in about 40 minutes. But would it be bona fide fun, or Kickstarter Crap (©Martin) ?

 very early doors

The verdict was positive. Maybe not a Martin game - despite more interaction than first appears, it's a brisk Euro - but there's a simple mechanic at play that gives it some intrigue. On your turn you can take one of three basic actions - grow your tribe, explore (adding hexes to your own mini-board) or move the tribes across the land, accessing new hexes - and new resources.

walking, yes indeed

The resources are used for the non-basic action, which is inventing something. Your tribes survive across the paleolithic, neolithic and bronze ages, so some inventions arise. They might be as simple as leather or the wheel, or they might be the surprisingly topical idea of despotism.

Ian's tribes

One invention leads to another, which provided some wry comedy: only after you've invented cooking, for instance, can you become a despot. If you don't have the resources you need to invent something, you can always 'exhaust' a non-matching hex as a joker - flipping it over to it's non-resource side, lost forever. Ian exhausted a couple of sheep this way, in order to invent smelting...

gold needed to invent currency, or mercenaries

Inventing gives you a points reward, and your tribe advances in other ways too - making their basic actions more fruitful, or improving their strength to resist the events that happen from time to time.

But the twist with Tribes is the choosing of the action you take - action tiles are laid out in a vertical time track: the tile at the bottom is free to use, but if you want to take an action further up the track, you must pay a shell - the game's currency - to skip any tiles you're not using. When you use the action tiles you get any shells on it, and the activated tile goes to the top of the time track.

This is the real crux of the game, because if you find yourself with no shells - as both Ian and I did at some stage - you have no choice, and have to take the bottom action tile - yes, I know - even if it's a crappy, punitive event tile that's been added into the mix.

crappy, and punitive

I started well, then Ian surged ahead mid-game, before finally we were both overhauled by Chris, who trotted out a convincing winner:

Chris 34
Sam 28
Ian 27

And at this point - 11pm - Chris left for home, with Ian and I breaking out the whisky. We finished with another new game - Lanterns: The Harvest Festival, making it an evening of semi-colon games. (someone can joke about this in the comments if they like). This is a rather sweet tile-laying game where thematically you're floating lanterns out onto a lake, and mechanically you're trying to collect Lantern cards to cash in for dedications (dedications: victory points).

geometric lake

When you place a tile every player gets a lantern card of the colour facing them on the tile. But if you match colours with any adjacent tiles, you get bonus lanterns. And if you match colours and have a floating platform on the tile, you get favour tokens, which can be used to trade one colour lantern for another. As the dedication tiles demand sets (four of a kind, three pairs or one each of the seven colours) these can come in very handy.

It's sweet, but not without an edge: you can see what your opponent is after and place a tile in order to give them a colour they don't need, or even none at all, as lantern tiles are finite (only five of each colour in a two player game)

endgame

Ian won a tight contest in the first game, and I took the honours in our second. The clock was now
beeping midnight, and we ended honors even. A fun couple of hours, even if 10pm is maybe not going to be a regular start time...