Vindication is quite silly. Though it pretends to be an epic - and it does have a sense of story - I'm pretty sure the inherent silliness is deliberate. You begin washed up on the shore of some distant - from anywhere - isle, and must rebuild your self-belief and self-respect by travelling this land and building some kind of rep. Thematically, that's making friends (-followers) finding relics (relics) developing traits (traits) and killing monsters. Each thing you do relates to an aspect of your character - strength, knowledge and inspiration are the basics (and all you need to make friends), but you can also develop wisdom (- get traits!) courage (- fight monsters!) and vision (- find relics!). Collectively these are all represented by distinctly-coloured cards. The cards score points themselves, and having the majority in a type of card means you get a mastery token for considerable bonus points at the end of the game.
You also have secret objectives that can potentially score points - it's a strange path to vindication really, as though the first thing you said upon waking was that you were bloody well going get three relics and befriend a gnome before the day was out. But it's fun, and despite the abstraction of how the wheels turn, really fast-moving also: on your turn you can do three actions in any order you like. You must move around the island; you can activate either yourself (free) or one of your followers (not free; coming to that in a moment) and either visit a location on the board, or 'rest'.
Everyone's got a board of cubes that functions as a sort of cosmic economy of your soul: it tracks your potential, influence, and conviction. Influence is where it's really at, as it's these cubes you spend to take actions and build up the character aspects mentioned above. Potential can be turned into influence by resting, and conviction is called for a lot less but can be helpful taking control of parts of the island, or stopping your followers from dying when they battle monsters for you - you never battle monsters yourself, as you consider it uncouth.
So a turn can literally be 20 seconds at times. How the game ends sort of escalates too: there are two random end-game criteria revealed at the start, but as players work their way up the score-track more and more are revealed - despite looking like an all-day undertaking, you can blast through it in an hour. Even though I vindicated myself and he didn't, Andrew blasted better than me though:
Andrew 100
Sam 82
We moved on to a light abstract stone-pusher in SHŌBU. Light on rules, that is. The gameplay itself asks for some shrewd decision-making: Your goal is to push all of your opponents' pieces off any of the four boards. You have two home-boards (light and dark) and on your turn you first make a passive move: move one of your stones on one of your homeboards up to two spaces. Then you make an aggressive move: move one of your stones on either board of the opposite colour. With the passive move you can't push stones - with the aggressive move you can, so you're trying to shovel the other player over the edges of the boards whilst - as much as you can - protecting your own.
It's quite canny, because generally striking out aggressively puts you in jeopardy, but aggression is what's needed to win the game. Trying to keep the battle on your opponent's side gives you more scope for passive moves on your homeboards and keeps them hemmed in. It can be quite swingy, but my previous games against Sal, Stan and Joe gave me the edge.
Sam - wins!
And with that, we wrapped up the evening. I realised I was slightly drunk when I tried to get the whole family downstairs for a game of Wavelength, but it was not to be. Very nice to taste a hint of of Tuesdays past though, and hopefully future. Out, damned Covid!
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