Copper bottoms out while tin foils plans

Today was the first “proper” games night of the week (ie, one that had been arranged more than twenty-four hours in advance) and four doughty players (Me – Andrew, Sam, Jonny and Adam) were in attendance for the feast of joy that is Board Games.

Adam and I arrived bang on time, seemingly not jaded at all after three games evenings in the space of a week. While three of us waited for Jonny to arrive, we tried a simple yet cunning game called “Hey, That’s My Fish!” In this game, penguins hop from one chunk of floating ice to another, collecting fish and leaving gaps wherever they once stood. Each player must be careful not to get trapped behind these gaps, but Sam showed himself to be the master of cutting himself off with a plentiful supply of fish that he can take at his leisure. It was non-Leaderboard, but just for the sake of complete-ness the scores were Sam 35, Adam 30, Andrew 30.

Then Jonny arrived and he chose Tinners’ Trail as tonight’s main event. We set up and set about filling Cornwall with water-logged holes as we chased the price of tin and copper up and down the markets. I began with a simple strategy: finish ahead of Adam and you're bound to finish first. A strategy that, for once, was not true.

Adam started slowly, investing no money at all in the first round. I had the (slightly soggy) East Cornwall area all to myself for most of the game while the other three battled for the rest of the county. But Adam was on the receiving end of some poor rolls and despite an incredible run in the final round where he actually earned over £100, he couldn’t make up for his early slow start.

But as the final round began, I couldn’t tell who was in the lead. Myself, Jonny and Sam all had quite a presence on the investor board/score track. In the end, Sam took the first place, with me in second and Adam taking third from Jonny right at the end.

Sam 115
Andrew 108
Adam 101
Jonny 100

Afterwards, Adam told me how I could’ve played it differently so as to win, but I think he was just sublimating the desire to tell himself how he could’ve avoided third.

After that, Jonny sped home and Sally was tempted by the lure of the Leaderboard to a game of “Hey, That’s My Fish!” Adam was keen to play again, suspecting the game had hidden depths. Sally was given a guide to the rules – of which there are only two, more or less. The game was fast and deadly (for the fish) and by the end the scores told a very interesting story.

Sam 28
Sally 26
Andrew 24
Adam 22

Adam, for the first time in months, finished a game outside the top three. Meanwhile, Sam surged ahead with his second win of the night.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	11	49.5	4.5
Adam	9	40.5	4.5
Andrew	11	38.5	3.5
Joe	5	16.5	3.3
Dan	2	8	4
Sally	1	4.5	4.5
Jonny	1	2.5	2.5

Peak Games

On the same night that we overdosed on strategy, Chris had summoned the Bracknell group...

+++++

Another instalment of the Bracknell GNN saw Paul and Chris (me) join up after James explained he couldn't make it earlier in the day.

We decided to kick the evening off with Aton, a new game to Paul. After listening intently to my 'expert' explanation of the rules he manfully tried to look less confused than he actually was and agreed to proceed. My recent experience and Paul's lack of showed early on as I bounded round the scoring track and filled up the temples with blue counters as I went. After the first scoring round I was in a commanding position. However, the penny dropping in Paul's mind was almost audible as he embarked on a determined fightback. Alas to no avail as a second scoring round saw me launch over the line.

Chris 45
Paul 28

Buoyed by his finishing charge and the realisation that the black squares really are a winning move, Paul asked if we could play another game of Aton. The first game had finished quickly and it wasn't even 8pm yet so we set up another round. As is typical with this more abstract type of game, once my opponent actually grasps the rules I'm often left clinging to their coat tails as they forge a path of superior tactics and logic. Paul duly obliged and by the end of the first scoring round was in a formidable 10 point lead. I shifted my strategy to one of trying pinch cheap points to close the gap but unfortunately Paul cottoned on to this and began to block. The game ended a closer affair than the final scores suggest, Paul getting a couple of useful 4's in his hand before the final scoring round.

Paul 44
Chris 33

With the night still young we moved on to our main game of the evening. Paul quite graciously accepted my request and puppy dog eyes to play London, a game introduced to us by Sam at Septcon. After a quick rules refresher we were off, blue prints in hand and appointments in the book to see the bank manager in the morning. Early on it would seem that we both had the more cautious approach of the three player game in our memories as we both made small display stacks and concentrated on building as much money as possible. Slowly it dawned on us that the resource restriction of a third player wasn't there and you could play as expansively as you liked. Paul in particular raced ahead in his stack building and showing an utter contempt for the arts and culture as he proceeded to build an empire based on hard economic reality. I however, saw that Paul was starting to burn himself out and plumped for a borough domination tactic and a balanced stack. As we two mavericks of industry forged ahead poverty became a thing of the past in our utopian society. Finally as the two hour mark neared and we had exhausted the card deck the final tot up showed that my 11 boroughs and 6 underground stations out weighed Paul's card victory point haul.

Chris 116 (Money=10, Boroughs=57, VP Cards=25, VP=24, Pov=0)
Paul 100 (Money=13, Boroughs=38, VP Cards=30, VP=19, Pov=0)

I like this game even more now I have played it again but I would have liked to have seen a more restrictive two player version than simply a smaller card display.... Maybe the BGG community has some suggestions..

Just another day in Junkie Town

Like alcoholics pretending that there’s nothing wrong in having a sixth drink because you’ve already finished the fifth and because you’re going to have a seventh, the GNN regulars sent out a call for any attendees this evening for a quick game. Myself (Andrew) and Adam heeded the call and, for the third time in four days the Leaderboard was called into action.

We chose Eketorp as our first game of the evening. This game of Viking-placement is still new and with naive excitement coursing through his veins, Sam started out by sending five of his men to pick up one bit of granite. While he got the piece of granite, it did mean that Adam and me were able to take the rest of the materials without too much opposition. This left Sam in a position of disadvantage that he never really recovered from.

As a three-player game, the balance of the game changed slightly, and there seemed to be far less combat this time. Adam picked up high-scoring materials almost without opposition. Before long, Adam had five -sixths of his castle built and Sam and I were playing catch-up. But Sam turned against me in the final round in a last desperate attempt at getting second place, and although he managed to scurry away with some turf, it was too little too late.

Adam 43
Andrew 30
Sam 15

It’s quite a different game with fewer players, and think it may be better the more people there are. It’s a bit difficult to say, since we’ve only played it twice.

We then searched for another short-ish hour-long game to fill up that annoying final forty-five minutes before we really should have finished. We chose Trans America, and discovered that this was the first time that Adam played the “Vexation rule”. Unfortunately, it was second nature to him, and he easily strode to his second win of the evening.

Adam 2
Sam 8
Andrew 13

I can have no complaints about my third place. In the first round I had some very lucky cards, but spent too much time fretting over my one far-flung station to wrap the round up as quickly as I should.

Although the leaderboard may look a bit daunting for the newcomer, don’t forget, there are plenty of ways to win apart from not having anything to do with your weekday evenings except endlessly racking up points in one game after another.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	9	38.5	4.28
Adam	7	34.5	4.93
Andrew	9	30.5	3.39
Joe	5	16.5	3.3
Dan	2	8	4

Henn Lays a Golden Egg

The call came in at just before 7pm: Joe was doing impromptu games. Despite feeling exhausted I knew the thought of handling meeples would keep me awake if I went to bed - is there a support group for this? - so off I went, joining Adam and Andrew at Joe's house - which unbeknownst to us, disappointed Joe. He was hoping for just one opponent to play A Few Acres of Snow with.

Instead we broke out Alhambra - new to me, but not the others who had played some time back. This is a Dirk Henn creation, he of Eketorp and the highly-rated (on BGG, at least) Shogun.

Each player in this game is building their own version of Alhambra - starting with a central fountain they lay tiles around it representing various buildings, sometimes walled, sometimes not. As long as they are accessible from the central fountain these castles can take on any kind of shape - much the same method the Moors adopted for the real deal, I imagine - and to counter your building efforts you need to choose whether to take your turn laying a tile, or collecting the money that allows you to buy a tile in the first place. Come the three scoring rounds players score for the amount of buildings they have for each colour - naturally, the most contested buildings are the most valuable.

It's very easy to pick up but deceptively deep, with room for strategy. When is the right time to buy a building? When to pick up cash? Do you use your 'reserve' and keep a building for the future, when it'll maximise your design (longest walls in each castle score points, so the layout needs to bear this in mind as well as the limitations of the tiles themselves). A little gem in the mechanic is the ability to take more than one turn if you pay for a building with the exact price - not always possible when the money cards come up randomly, with random numerical values.

Joe shot off into an early lead in the first scoring round as the rest of us bunched together. Andrew was looking healthy in the second round but slipped back on the third and final round, as Joe came slightly unstuck courtesy of some unrewarding gardens. My uncontested middle-range building allied to a very long wall saw me into comfortable second, but long-game-visionary Adam reaped the rewards of his investment in the most monied buildings to claim first place:

Adam 105

Sam 103

Joe 92

Andrew 68

This game ticked a lot of boxes for me - fun, looks good, easy to play but with depth, and over quickly enough to squeeze in another game afterwards, in this case Poison, a perennial filler everyone is amenable to.

My starting hand had a lot of green poison cards and, though this game is still a bit of a mystery as to what the best tactics are (the obvious ones being obvious to your fellow players as well) the freedom of laying them wherever you like does seem to help. In a tight first round I picked up no cards and nobody scored over 10. The second hand saw me strike it lucky again with a series of low-value cards, with which I managed - inadvertently - to screw over Joe, who picked up a hefty 19 points. Andrew, Adam and I were still in close contention though, and Adam took the lead after round three. But I managed to pull it back for another win in a high-scoring third round:

Sam 18

Adam 22

Andrew 24

Joe 35

Thanks for hosting Joe.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	7	31.5	4.5
Adam	5	24.5	4.9
Andrew	7	23.5	3.36
Joe	5	16.5	3.3
Dan	2	8	4

Bite my finger

The call went out this afternoon for potential gamers since Sam found he had an evening to himself. Myself (Andrew) and Dan (a gamer from the pre-GNN period of our history) were available. And in our eagerness to get as many names on the leaderboard as possible, Sam and I decided that this was an official GNN evening. So we got out the referee’s armbands, whistles and timepieces and got down to work.

We chose Citadels as our game. Easy to learn, yet tense enough to make you mistrust your fellow man. We explained the rules to Dan, and the game commenced. I found myself on the receiving end of both the assassin and the thief in round one, effectively giving the other two an one-round head-start. But that’s all part of the game, isn’t it? Dan generously missed a go in the next round when he forgot he was the thief until it was far too late. Sam built lots of green buildings but then was too scared to chose the Merchant since he figured it would be a prime target for the assassin.

I battled back, with two “six coins for eight points” cards boosting my score, and Sam went for an early shut-out by building a lot of lesser cards. In the end, the game was surprisingly close. If the Bishop hadn’t been killed in the final round, I would have won. Meanwhile Sam discovered in some post-match analysis that he could have come first if he’d used his Warlord instead of building. But in the event Dan came away winner.

Dan 35
Sam 34
Andrew 31

A “quick” game of Trans-America was suggested. Again, Dan was a newcomer to the rules, but this is a game that needs barely any introduction, and he was soon up to speed. I started well, winning the first two rounds, but then I was stung for nine points in the third. Sam won the last two rounds to take first place overall.

Sam 5
Andrew 13
Dan 14

Oh, and the explanation for the post title? During the evening, Dan told us about some unused footage from the documentary about monkeys he’s currently making, which involved an alpha male monkey bumming another monkey while a third monkey pushed his finger in his mouth in some weird primate fetish. Unfortunately, some people taking photos can clearly be seen at the edge of the screen. Otherwise it may have been usable.

Bloody tourists.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	5	21.5	4.3
Andrew	5	17.5	3.5
Adam	3	14.5	4.83
Joe	3	10.5	3.5
Dan	2	8	4

Pillage idiots

Tonight saw just the four of us (myself, Sam, Joe and Adam) begin a new season. There was no opening ceremony, but I inwardly enjoyed the brief feeling of being joint top in points ratio before the first game began.

We chose Ascending Empires, the deceptively tactical game of space exploration. At first, it's all about vectors and velocities, as players flick their tiny ships across the galaxy (and Einstein was right – the space-time continuum is curved. In fact, it bends down slightly towards the edges) but before long, a clever use of tech levels is required to increase your options.

Joe continued to suffer from twitch-finger but more than made up for it with a canny exploitation of what resources he did have. One of his tech levels allowed him to place men on unoccupied planets, so he spent most of the last few rounds mining. He ended with only four planets on the board, but he also had a large pile of victory points sitting in front of him. I became increasingly obsessed by my inability at finding a grey planet. Adam's intergalactic space empire stretched across the board, with cities almost everywhere. Meanwhile, Sam forgot that just having a presence in all four quadrants isn't enough for a bonus – you need cities there too. His dreams of a six point bonus evaporated, and left him in third.

Joe 24
Adam 22
Sam 21
Andrew 18

A wise man once said “a man who has one watch always knows the time. A man who has two watches is never sure.” Well, the same applies to people describing the rules of a board game. It was still early, so we decided to try a new game, Ekethorp.

Sam may have had the rule book in front of him, but it was Joe who'd read the forums on Boardgamegeek. And so Sam's reading was often interrupted by Joe adding or correcting a little detail. After each interjection, Joe would then say “and that's all I know! I don't know any more” and he'd insist that Sam continue. And then a minute or so later, Joe would remember something else he'd read and would mention that, too.

As for the game, it involves secretly choosing where to place your men (Vikings) on the board in order to get the randomly placed materials, or to attack your opponents castle and steal materials from there. A sort of cross between Stone Age and Garibaldi. Since it was everyone's first go, I'm not sure if anyone had any real tactics. Adam went for the high scoring materials while I went for cheap stuff that no one else would want, hoping to get the bonus points for having completed my castle (which I missed out on by one brick. I mean – a castle with just one brick missing is as good as any other castle, right?). No one was quite sure what Joe was doing.

Adam 37
Andrew 35
Sam 29
Joe 13

An interesting game, pretty tense and nervy. The battles between Vikings were decided by use of cards from 1-6 and there seemed to be an awful lot of sixes out there. That was perhaps the least satisfying aspect of the game, but still I enjoyed it and would happily play it again.

Amazingly, after that game, it was still early. At least, that's what Sam insisted, despite what the clock said, so a quick game of For Sale was agreed upon. Until Sam remembered he never wins For Sale, so it was changed to No Thanks.

Sam 28
Adam 35
Andrew 37
Joe 40

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Adam	3	14.5	4.83
Sam	3	12.5	4.17
Joe	3	10.5	3.5
Andrew	3	10.5	3.5

Bracknell Discoveries

Monday night saw two of the Bracknell branch members (There's only three of us) James and Chris (Me) take to the table again.

Having played the original version of Carcassonne several times we were quite interested to give the game's Discovery variation a play. This version is sold as game in its own right rather than as an expansion, where the fields remain but the cloisters, roads and cities are replaced by individual cities, mountains and seas. The scoring for these areas, although similar has some crucial differences where incomplete areas can be scored - albeit for less points - during play, meaning there was a steady build up of points. Also the escalating contention for the high scoring farms is completely eradicated thereby removing the single winning route to victory that the first version suffers from.

So to the game itself. Initial scoring was spread equally between us but after a run where I picked up a bunch of tiles with cities on I was able to place myself in a strong position and scored accordingly. This proved to be enough as I held off a determined fight back by James to win by 20 points. On reflection we both enjoyed the Discovery version but rather felt that we liked elements of both.

On to our second game of the evening, Aton. Some 3 weeks ago James and I attempted to play this but after one and a half frustrating games we decided to pack it away as neither of us were enjoying it at all. In our eyes it didn't seem to work and was very unbalanced. Convinced that we must have interpreted the rules incorrectly we took another look. Sure enough we had. The crux of Aton is whether you get to place your tokens in the temples first or second but equally important you both get to remove your opponents tokens as well. We had been playing that only the winner of Cartouche 2 got to do that, and as it was generally a low number that won, nobody had a card high enough to remove any counters and the temples just filled up.

Unfortunately for me James is rather good at playing this type of game and wiped the floor with me in the first tie winning by 51 points to 23. In the second match I faired a little better and took the game to an exercise in brinkmanship as we both hovered by the 40 point winning margin. However it was James again who prevailed as I dealt myself a hand of kakka poo and my exchange token had already been used. James sailed past the 40 point mark and into a 2 - 1 lead on the night.

Aton is a great, quick little game with some subtlety to it and is a much much better game if you play by the correct rules