Token Gestures

The alternate Thursday weekly Old Fart club assembled last night with Chris, Paul J and myself comparing beard-growing capacities whilst we waited for Andrew. I suggested if we started a game he'd turn up, but even that wasn't necessary: the moment we navigated to boardgamearena, Mr E appeared, fashionably late and freshly-shaved. Or that's what it looked like anyway. The light was dim.

Our first game was Rallyman GT. This is a pretty straightforward racing game of laying out gear dice to move along the track - you can roll one at a time, and potentially halt your progress before you hit a certain number hazards (which would mean a loss of control: not good) or push your luck and keep rolling; hoping you don't roll that critical hazard. Or you can really push your luck and go Flat Out: roll all your dice at once and hope for the best. The benefit of doing so is that - as long as you haven't lost control - you get a focus token for every die you rolled, and these can be used on future turns to pay for a die result, and avoiding rolling it at all. That's pretty much it, except some corners restrict speed and some track restricts space. Everyone fell foul of a hidden danger - hidden in that either the interface or (more likely) my explanation was slightly off. All my Focus tokens simply vanished at one point, which was slightly irksome.

We all span off at one point or another - Paul most of all, as he kept going flat out to try and catch us and getting pretty much shat on by fate. Andrew cruised around as though on a Sunday drive and won by a country mile:

1 Andrew
2 Chris
3 Sam
Did not finish: Paul*

*Paul sacrificed his last two turns so we could wrap up and move on. It was fun, but I think it's a game that's better in the room - unlike our next game, the online aspect seemed to actually slow it down.

And the next game was of course 7 Wonders. Andrew had to dash off on a mission of mercy, so the three of us blasted through two quick games. In the first, Chris built almost no resource cards at all and worried that he'd made a mistake. But he hadn't - a convincing win despite having to buy almost every brick and beam of his city from his neighbours. Astonishing.

I won the next one though, so there.

Then with Andrew back in the virtual room, we sashayed our way through 4-player Kingdomino. Andrew was left to build mountain tiles completely unmolested, and by the time we realised our mistake(s), he'd claimed the win. I was gutted - I had convinced myself I was on for a subsequent Kingdomino victory, but no!

Andrew's bar-chart approach, right

Final scores

With the hour approaching ten, I bowed out. I will leave Andrew to take you through all that happened next....

*            *            *

We ended with Quantum, for which Paul needed a litle rules refresher but we were otherwise in like Flynn. I started badly and never improved. I rolled a 1, 2 and 4 and thought "aha, I can easily get some of those 8 cubes down by changing the 4 to a 5." Except the nearest planets to my home were all nines and with a two and a one on board, it would take forever to reach an eight. Instead, I spent my time attacking whoever was in first and totally failing to get a cube down at all. Shocking.

Paul played very well. We had to remind him about aggression getting him two dominance points when he already had four, thus allowing him to put two cubes down at once, but he needed no help at all to set up his last move in such a way that he couldn't be stopped, even though I thought I had when I relocated one of his cubes. He just warped somewhere else and left his five dice trundle over to join it.

Paul wins!
Andrew and Chris joint last, according to BGA but Chris only had one cube left and I had all four.

Thanks for that, guys. See you soon.