Sol Solutions

Saturday was Chris' birthday and to celebrate five of us converged on his house to let loose on a game of Twilight Imperium. My clever plan was to get there at 2pm for a refresher before we kicked off at 3pm. When I arrived at 2.15 I discovered my clever plan was actually a shit plan, though, as everyone was already present and raring to go. Thus, thanks to my cognitive confusion over simple timekeeping, I sat down to a game with high mental demands having last played it over 2 years ago. 

Late game TI4

What's more, Chris had since then added an expansion. As well as asymmetric factions with asymmetric ships and abilities, there were now several characters to either start with or unlock, and additional shenanigans on the board. Fighting down the urge to run back to the car, I took the most straightforward faction - Sol, with a dude who looked a bit like James Cordon - and set up in a corner of the galaxy nestled between Jon (black) and Aiden (pink). Opposite us were Paul (red) and Chris (yellow), with Stuart (orange) parked at the far end of the table. They all had faction names and strengths, and probably objectives as well, but at the start my main goal was not holding anyone up any more than I already had. Fortunately both Chris and Aiden coached me through the early turns, which followed a pattern for most of us of expanding out across the board, and in Jon's case, threatening anyone who came near his ships. 

My starting hex

TI has an intriguing political system, with players all choosing roles at the start of each round and - at some point - activating them for the primary ability. When this happens, everyone else can - potentially - activate the secondary ability, if they have a strategy token. But timing is critical, and you might want to delay your role by taking a tactical action instead - shuffling across the board, finding things, maybe starting a bit of aggro. Being able to take a place-holder type turn is helpful, and TI's multiple currencies of strategy tokens, tactical tokens and roles is further appended by both commodities and the numerous trading options: Chris got stuff off Jon simply for not firing at him. 

At the end of each round there's also a new law or directive that comes into play - or not. Players use influence they have in the galaxy (by controlling planets) to sway votes in the way they'd like them to go. Stuart had a leg up here as his faction often seemed to have a controlling voice in the room when motions were proposed: his ability was +6 influence on every vote. Chris' additions to the game even included a whiteboard they kept track of various things - turn order, points-scored etc - and any passed laws were added to this. 

But while Stuart was having his say in the corridors of power, out in the militarized zone of the board it was all about Jon and Aiden. Jon had powered and threatened his way to the centre of the galaxy (Mecatol Rex) to establish an early lead, but mid-game Aiden's patient fleet-building suddenly exploded its way across the board, riding over Jon in Mecatol Rex and trampling Chris' yellow fleet underfoot. Paul, Stu and I - the relative newbies, with a couple of plays each - all watched as Aiden spotted his potential competitors and put them to the sword. 

The calm before the storm

It had taken me a couple of hours to fully almost comprehend what was going on around me, but as we entered the endgame phase in the evening (after Chris' delicious chilli) things finally swam into focus. Curiously, as the parameters of the game began to make sense, I began making stupid mistakes. On the last round I activated my remove all tokens dude too early, and sent my flagship off in the wrong direction to score a public objective. I wouldn't have won, but sticking to the plan I'd made might have snuck me into joint second.

However the winner always looked like Jon or Aiden. And in the penultimate round, despite Aiden's huge presence across the board - and verbal brinkmanship! - Jon scored three points to catapult him to a point from the 12 he needed to win. 

Jon's ships, thanks to yellow and pink incursions from Chris and Aiden, were now blockaded in to a single hex, albeit there appeared to be about hundred of them there. If we were playing to 14 points it was clear the game would be Aiden's, but as we'd agreed on a dozen, there was the mystery of whether Jon had it about him to score the single point he needed, from a secret objective, perhaps, or getting the last trade good to 'buy' a point from the public objectives. Despite the misdirection, Jon had the trade good and wrapped up the win - aided by me, as I'd naively agreed to 'Support the Throne' (get a point each) with him in the preceding round...

Jon 12 / Aiden 11 / Chris-Sam 9 each / Paul 8 / Stuart 7

It hadn't felt like it, but eight hours had passed since we'd begun! So we wrapped up the evening with sillier fare in the form of Say Anything, a party game where the active player picks a question that doesn't have a categorical answer (eg What would I call my pet lion/ How do I remember the 90s/What's the best toy for an adult etc) and all the other players write potential answers. The active player then chooses one of these answers, but before revealing their choice, the other players all vote on which one they think was chosen (you can vote for yourself). 

not Paul's ideal dinner guest

The answers varied from mildly smutty to wildly inaccurate, with Aiden not choosing 'inflatable Jon' from Jon as his favourite toy. I did badly with Say Anything; I think Aiden won. It was fun - the type of game where scoring is almost irrelevant. But it was now about midnight and with galaxies won and party games partied, everyone headed off into the night.

Except Chris and I who played his birthday present from me, So Clover. It's better with more than two (officially it doesn't even play two!) but it was a nice way to put a second wrapping on the evening. Time for bed!

Well that escalated quickly

I'm not one to post many tales of Chippenham board gaming adventure but Saturday saw 6 gamers descend to my (Chris) place in search of Twilight Imperium 4 escapades. Although TI4 is a fairly engaging endeavour I did manage to take a number of photos to record the day.

Unfortunately I do not possess the literary ease at which a Sam or Andrew can kick out a report so this will kinda be more like a photo diary.... Apologies if its a little dull..

Kick off time was 2pm. I figured that should give us enough time to finish, something I hadn't achieved yet. Ken turned up at 1.30 as I was setting up to get a run through. He was the only person not to have played it before. Predictably he was to spend a lot of the game bamboozled, but he took the basics on board very well.

At 2pm a rush of knocks at the door brought us up to our full compliment of 6 (Lee, Aiden, Stuart, Paul, Ken and myself). After the briefest of introductions to those that hadn't met before it was down to choosing races and playing piece colour. (Naturally I demanded yellow - nobody cared). I'd decided to divide the races into groups of three and one of two. In each group there was a 4 and 3 commodity race to make it fair. The group of 2 was made up of strong races.

They were resolved as such...

Stuart was Xxcha Kingdom - Good at expansion - Green Player

Ken the Sardak Norr - Good combat race with plus 1 to rolls - Red Player (Red Ken lolz)

Chris the Federation of Sol - Basically humans who have a fascination with ground troops - Yellow player

Lee was the Barony of Letnev - Good at creating menacing fleets - Black player

Aiden was the Yin Brotherhood - Really good blowing everything up including themselves - Purple player

Paul was the Ghosts of Cruess who get their own tile off the board and the ability to place worm holes everywhere - Not sure Paul got to grips with it. - Blue player

So at the earlyish time of 2.30pm we were up and running on turn one.

The first two public agenda's looked tricky to achieve as they required real estate (2 hexes next to the centre with ships in and 6 non home systems with ships in). Out of my two secret objectives I opted for the one which required me to have three systems with ships next to an anomaly and since I had a supernova between myself and Stuart I thought this would be achievable. The rest of the table inched speculatively out, all showing interest in parts of the board but feigning any real intent. In terms of strategy I hadn't much to cling to further than "Lets see how it goes". Worryingly Aiden and Lee seemed to have plans and were questioning our moves in excellent displays of table talk...

At this point nobody was close enough to make any deals or transactions and nobody was playing the trader race Hakan, so the round ended without incident. Round 2 continued to see the inevitable land grab of available planets. The next public objective was spend 5 trade goods. Not too tricky. One by one races started to make deals swapping promissory notes and commodities. I had Ken and Stuart either side of me and each made a different kind offer. One was a ceasefire, meaning I would have to spend a precious tactical command token to break it, the other Support for the throne, which gave you a VP as long as you didn't attack the owner of it. I realised later that this probably wasn't a sound tactic to gain non aggression pacts with both my neighbours as it somewhat funnelled me in.

By round 3, with spend 8 resources as the next public agenda revealed several fleets were circling the centre hex Mecatol Rex without anyone wanting to help themselves to the bonus point an potential to score points.

Paul had made a slow start due to not realising a fundamental rule concerning his faction. He was in fact able to move off his world without wasting a turn. 

Finally I decided to break the deadlock and moved into Mecatol Rex collecting the bonus point for spending 6 influence, much to the groups collective raising of eyebrows since I only moved a single carrier and infantry. I hadn't been raising my forces as others had done and felt it wasn't going to be possible to defend it and sure enough in a few turns Lee's Barony arrived and the galaxies shortest reign was over. With the imperial strategy card in his hand it was a foregone conclusion. It was a position he managed to keep for the rest of the game remaining strangely unchallenged...

It was at this point I realised I hadn't been playing one of my factions benefits of an extra command token each round. It coincided with me being a few beers to the good and chose not to worry about it! At this stage I was in an improbable lead with 5 points. It wasn't to last as I wasn't planning for the future but rather relying on any cheap point grabs I could.

Now that Mecatol Rex had been taken the first of the two laws were voted on. I forget what the first one was but it never got as far as the vote because it was ruled out by an action card. The second law, which was passed, was to limit all fleet pools to a maximum of 4. The other side was to each lose a fleet pool token. A couple of people had riders on this not passing so Aiden decided that he wasn't having any of it and voted it out of existence with his copious influence.

Round 4 - Public objective - Control three planets that have technology specialities. 

In this round Aiden suddenly appeared out of a wormhole to offer me an exchange of promissory notes. I wavered and then the chance was gone along with his ships as I sent a little fleet to demand he returned back to his side of the board. He never returned. Things were also starting to hot up in the combat stakes with Aiden (Purple) and Ken (Red) having a battle and Paul and I moving into Lee's territories with single ships, promising that they were just sight seeing. Lee was not convinced and since being left out of a free trade was starting to feel a little unloved...

Midway through round 4 we broke for cremated Pizzas courtesy of my cooking and to watch the inevitable capitulation of the England rugby team. 

The mid game score looked like this, with me on 6, Lee on 4, Aiden and Stuart on 3, Paul on 2 and Ken on 1

After all the edible food was consumed we were back in to it 

At the end of this round Lee managed to score two objectives to draw level - I was starting to stagnate as Lee was picking up speed.

In the agenda phase the first law was hotly contested between Stuart and myself. We were to collectively elect a player to gain a privilege of extra trade goods. Several rider cards appeared with players betting on the outcome. I thought I'd secured it by spending nearly all my influence and adding an action card which gave me 5 extra only to see Stuart sabotage it with a card of his own.

Round 5 - Public Objective - Spend 10 trade goods.

The game was starting to loosen up now with factions coming out of their protective portions of the galaxy to try and eke out some vital victory points but nobody was really paying proper attention to Lee, each of us allowing him to take the Imperial Strategy card again with him sitting in Mecatol Rex. The card allows you to score 1 point for being in the centre but also you can score a public objective right away which he was able to. Suddenly he was 2 points away from the win and nobody was even close. Even a concerted effort to attack him probably would have been futile. Sure enough at the end of the round he was able to score one more objective to bring himself within one point of victory. 

I tried and failed miserably to score another point as I needed to bombard someone's infantry off a planet and failed my roll of 5 (50/50 chance). Then I noticed my I didn't have ships in a hex that I needed when I went to score another. Ken and Aiden continued their very destructive battles and Stuart had decided he'd had enough of being Mr nice guy and was gearing up to attack my poorly defended flank. Luckily for me we ran out of time because....

The next round Lee quickly scored another secret objective and it was all over in a little under 5 hours plus tea break.

The final scores were;
Lee 10
Chris 6
Aiden and Paul 5
Stuart 4
Ken 3

Final board state

I was pleased to finally get to play a 6 player game and also to finish it but we were all amazed at how quickly the end came about. I think our inexperience at considering the game state and Lee's position of strength prevented us from trying to put the breaks on his charge. Especially when it came to scoring the Imperial strategy card - Which I took once to gain an additional secret objective but no one else did.

Anyway my next session is next month but I don't think I'll do another one of these...It takes me forever!!!

To round the evening off we had a game of Concordia, (Ken left) and then Take it Easy, and finished off with Decrypto. What a great day!!

The Magnificent Seven (hour game)

If a games weekend is a rare treat then two in the space of a week must be the height of decadence. But there we were, Sam and I, just six days since we returned from the last one, back in a car full of board games heading for the countryside. This weekend centred around the fast-aging quartet of gamers who used to gather and play when they lived in London. We'd booked the same cottage that we had two years ago, near Wool in Dorset. And our first impressions were that it hadn't changed at all (except the outside had been painted).

2016

2018

We had, though. After a brief spell of greetings and unpacking, we sat down for our first game, only to all get up again and get our spectacles.

This game was Decrypto. How strange it was to play this in daylight and sober. It was the Coffee Drinkers (me and Sam) against the Tea Drinkers (Paul and Chris) and they got two interceptions for a quick win. “Lucky we’re good at guessing random numbers,” remarked Paul.

The next game was Auztralia, Martin Wallace's genre bending game, part Steam, part Hit Z Road. Sam quickly got stuck in a corner and had to repeatedly recycle his cubes in an unproductive way. I built up a network of farms and railways, hoping my defences would hold firm.

Paul, as ever with a new game, was in an experimental mood. When he picked a card that allowed two enemy tiles to be revealed, he actioned it immediately. I thought it was a bit too early in the game but the tiles he chose to flip over weren't near me, so I didn't caution him against it.

I wish I had since one of them was a shoggoth and in this particular game those buggers just wouldn't sit still. The first made mincemeat of Chris's farms, a second one piled into Sam's and a third had a pop at me. Finally the first one, bored with Chris, turned its attention to neighbouring Paul and worked its way through that network until he was at Paul's port. If he lost that, we were doomed. The shoggoth moved next turn. It had 6 hit points and Paul whittled it down to one left when it struck the fatal blow. Paul's port was destroyed and the game was done. A resounding win for Cthulu.

Cthulu 64
Sam 10
Andrew 8
Paul 6
Chris 1

Chris didn't seem too keen on a game where he scored just one point in ninety minutes.

Chris then made food while Paul, Sam and I played Take It Easy. Another late-night game brought several hours forwards. We all used “Memories of Maidstone” (where we studied) as our theme when calling tiles. How nice to revisit moments like “Me and Mike on the sofa in the Rising Sun” or “Dave Pearce playing guitar during a power cut.”

Sam 460
Andrew 406
Paul 337

After this was risotto from Chris, which was a huge success.

By now it was almost seven, so we got out a nice fun evening game: Lords of Vegas. It was Paul’s first game, but he took to it very quickly, with his $15m bets and he came up with old folksy sayings like “I don’t want to leave all my fish in a barrel.” Chris played a very focused game, in that almost all his property was in one block of the city. Sam had two unassailable casinos of four and five which neatly propelled him up the scoretrack. He was in such a strong position that a mid-game wobble (when a re-organisation of a three-tile casino went all wrong) couldn’t stop his march to the top.

Sam 54
Andrew 36
Chris 26
Paul 23

Then we played Face Cards, the game that allows you to say things like “No, that Rockhopper Penguin is not Abraham Lincoln,” without seeming mad.

Andrew 11
Sam 9
Chris 8
Paul 4

Next we had a break, sat back and worked our way through a WHSmith’s box of trivia questions we’d found in the cabin, before following that up with a game of Sausage and Mash.

But as for real games, our next one was Texas Showdown. I did have Beef Jerky in my bag, but I’d forgotten my promise to bring it out if we play a Western-themed game.

Paul 5
Sam 8
Chris 13
Andrew 19

And after this was Letter Tycoon, with occasional forays into obscenity. I mean, it was eleven in the evening. Chris, the Scrabble player, won.

Chris 43
Sam 40
Paul 31
Andrew 27

By now there was no stopping us. Raj hit the table and Chris nabbed another win, holding off my late surge.

Chris 64
Andrew 61
Sam 37
Paul 27

Finally, Decrypto came back to the table. Now it was The Barchester Chronicles (Sam & Chris) against The Tess Of The D’Urbervilles (me & Paul). The Barchester Chronicles won, although Chris did use a couple of punning clues (ie, “A book” pointed to the word “red”). Also, Paul’s stomach was extremely vocal for much of the game.

Finally, it was time for bed.

Saturday dawned, I was up first and I spent some time reading the Quick Start rule book to Twilight Imperium, the giant box of game that had been staring at us since we got here. As people emerged, we turned our attention to the crossword.

During this time, Chris and I banged out a quick Biblios, which I won thanks to remembering the final card in the auction deck was a “move two dice up” card.

Andrew 9
Chris 7

Next we continued our theme of playing games-usually-only- played-when-drunk by playing The Mind! We didn’t do well, only getting to Round Five. Paul lost us a life when he was distracted by Chris’ story about buying a record by Tiffany from Woolworth's.

After this was the first big game of the day: Keyflower. It has been a while since I last played (three and a half years!) so I needed a rule refresher. I wish I could remember my strategy but, apart from making sure I upgraded my upgrading ability first, I don’t remember much.

Andrew 53
Paul 49
Chris 48
Sam 41

Then we went outside for a walk. As far as I can tell, exactly the same walk as last time we were here.

Having returned, we settled down for a game of Spheres Of Influence the Risk-y game of global domination. I got stuck on the sides of the board, with Canada and Japan not making great partners. Sam cut a swathe across Russia to China and then down into India. Paul set up camp, Risk style, in Australasia and then pottered about in South Africa and Malaysia. Chris took South and Mid America and the US as well as North Africa.

Tension mounted in the final round as an enormous flotilla of Sam’s ships left India, headed for the Mediterranean to do mischeive with Chris’ troops that had recently set up camp in Europe. But, shock, they turned their attention to North Africa, while Sam’s ex-Soviet troops try to unsettle the EU. It was the right thing to do, and it nabbed him an extra capital city for the win.

Sam 2 spheres, 3 cities
Paul 2 spheres, 2 cities
Andrew 2 spheres, 2 cities
Chris 1 sphere, 2 cities

Paul wasn’t keen, pointing out that he’d made no real progress in the final three rounds of the game.

After this, with a request from Paul to avoid dice-dependant combat games, we chose Kingdom Builder. Sam sat down with his laptop to do some work while the three of us battled it out.

Paul 54
Chris 53
Andrew 38

Now it was my turn to cook, and people rested and tried the crossword again. After my pizzas, we set up a game of Rajas of the Ganges, reassuring Paul that these were good dice.

Sam went big on cash while Paul went big on fame. Chris and I didn’t really do either although whenever any of us rolled two ones, we always put them on the chest area of the dice statue as sort of dice nipples. I’m pretty sure Chris started that.

It couldn’t have been closer in the final reckoning, with Sam and Paul ending with their two tokens barely past each other, and Paul winning on a tie-breaker.

Paul
Sam
Andrew
Chris

Then we played the Book Game, in which a book is chosen from the bookshelf by one player, and the blurb on the back is read out aloud. All the other players have to come up with a potential opening line, and all these are read out together by the Book-Chooser. The idea is to spot the correct opening line, and you get points for people guessing yours.

Our source for The Book Game

Sam fooled me completely with an opening line for a book based around youth in the 1970s, which he put down as “Pip, pip, pip.” I thought no one would reference the sound of an old public telephone except a paid writer, so I chose it, forgetting that Sam is a paid writer.

Paul threw us all with his first choice of book, whose opening line referenced sweating “down to her sensible cotton underwear.”

It ended with another dead heat between Paul and Sam.

Paul 7
Sam 7
Andrew 6
Chris 4

During this we discussed how David Bowie’s taste in games might have changed as he approached death, going from big, epic games to trick-takers. And talking of short games, we ended with Fuji Flush, the seemingly random card game that I am somehow good at.

Andrew 0
Paul 1
Sam 2
Chris 2

Once more to bed.

With the sound of distant quad bikes, we slowly stirred on Sunday morning until we were all up by nine. At first, we didn’t mention games at all. Were we all ignoring the elephant in the room? The elephant in question being the large game box containing Twilight Imperium.

Chris gave us every opportunity to reject it, but I was curious and, besides, this would be the only opportunity for us to actually play it. We agreed, with the proviso of a 6pm cut-off point. We set it up, somewhat surprised that Chris had added a little whiteboard to the package. I wondered just how complicated this was going to be. After a rules explanation, we set off into the universe at 11.45am.

There were, inevitably, some issues with the rules. I think the term “production value” of a planet caused some confusion and what happens to it when the planet is exhausted. Sam was first to score a point, and it was still only round one!

Apart from Paul’s mad dash to the centre, it was quite a genteel game. When trading tokens, we actually swapped them instead of simply moving them from one part of our player board to another. And we broke for lunch during round two, with Paul providing sliced malt loaf.

Paul upgraded his cannons in round three, and seemed very keen to use them on anything that came close. With his control of the central planet of Mercatol Rex, he found himself in a lead at the end of round three: Paul 4, Sam 2, Chris 2, Andrew 1.

View from the window as round four begins

Chris and Sam got into some “friendly” invasions as they realised they needed each others’ planets to score points before Chris started to worry about Sam’s close proximity to his home planet, and had a pop at him anyway. Chris won that space battle, but couldn’t land troops to retake the any territory.

As we began round five, it was clear that this would be the final act of the game. Paul and Sam engage in a decidedly un-epic space battle with no hits on either side until Paul announced his retreat, and then he started getting some hits like someone walking away from an argument they weren’t going to win while still shouting insults.

At the end of the round, Sam tried to attack Paul in Mercator Rex as a fitting finale to the game. Sam was wiped out by Paul’s not inconsiderable amount of ships and cannons on that previously peaceful planet. A fun spectacle to end the game, at least.

View from the window as round five ends

Sam 8
Chris 7
Paul 7
Andrew 7

I enjoyed it. It was pretty intense, and it certainly didn’t feel like seven hours. Each player is always involved and I certainly never had to wait 17 minutes for something to do like I did on Spheres Of Influence (yes, I timed it).

Paul and I went out in the dark to take out some recycling at the end of the dirt road that lead to the cottage and when we’d come back, Chris was still packing away the game! An epic in every sense.

After Sam’s salmon supper, we played Calimala. Chris won this game while achieving either (a) a piece of brilliant misdirection from him or (b) a massive lack of visual comprehension by us. Troyes was the publicly-known end of scoring card, but everyone had forgotten about it. In he final scoring, Chris won it with only one cube in there. None of us had even registered it. It was worse for me, since I had a trading house already built there and could’ve shipped to Troyes at any time! Afterwards, Chris told us he didn’t want to ship any more there in case that alerted us to how important it was. Marvellous play.

Chris 35
Sam 29
Andrew 27
Paul 24

And what better way to end a weekend in an isolated cabin than a game about zombies? Hit Z Road hit z table (see what I did there?) and we all diced with death. Sam went big on survivors, having seven at one point. Paul used his many resources to get out of a tight scrape while I bid high to get first choice of the paths to safety, naming my four meeples Andrew, Paul, Chris and Sam to make it more interesting.

The four of us, in meeple form

Chris, by now looking a bit like a zombie himself, never bid for starting player and relied on luck to get him through. And he got it. His second to last battle was his three survivors against six zombies, followed by another six zombies. He got past the first with six ranged shots and then took out two of the next bunch at long range. He then managed to kill off the final four, but not before they’d finished another of his survivors. In the next round, his luck held out (beating four zombies in a defiant last stand) and he made it to the end, alive but clearly ready for bed.

Sensible Paul picked up all the bonuses for resources, and ran out a clear winner.

Paul 13
Chris 10
Sam 8
Andrew 7

And so we were done for the day. And for the weekend. Back to reality tomorrow and I remarked that this must be how Superman feels when he changes back into Clark Kent. No more amazing battles or incredible stories.

At least, not until next time.