Game Time in the Smith's

Joe's prescient comment on GNN applied all too well for Bracknell's split games nights. On the Monday I introduced James to the wonders of Stone Age. Two weeks ago Paul and I had whizzed through a game and still had time for 3 rounds of Aton. This week, with rule intake aside, we found ourselves checking that the side of the box did in fact say 60-90 minutes. Your first game of Stone Age can be a daunting experience especially against someone with a few games under their belt. As with my first game when Sam stressed the importance of culture cards and it wasn't until it was too late that I started collecting them, James found the variety of choices too enticing and embarked upon a balanced approach. Unknown to him, within the first 6 or 7 rounds, I had snaffled all of the people multipliers and was visiting the love hut with insatiable regularity. The game ended when we had exhausted the supply of civ cards which probably had something to do with the length of the game. With all of the civ cards split between us the hut, axe, field and people multipliers went nuts with scores coming up thus.

Chris 318
James 186

James revealed this was his favourite game so far. The rematch in a couple of weeks probably won't be so one sided!

On Tuesday Paul popped over again and it was decided to give new game A Few Acres Of Snow an airing. As mentioned before on the blog it is a 2 player game representing the war between Britain and France over the North East Americas. We started at about 7.30 and optimistically thought we would probably get a quick game of citadels in at the end before Paul's train at 11. Didn't really work out like that. The rules........ I had spent an hour going through them in the day to make the process a little easier when it got to game time. Unfortunately It didn't help. The game plays out like a version of Dominion and London stuck together and as with those two there is a lot of card referencing to be done. It's a game worth persevering with as once you get over the hump of your first 5 moves it starts to flow. However, to the newbie, the extended AP and constant checking of what a card does and what goes with it as well slowed play right down. By 10pm we were hitting our stride and starting to make headway toward each other after a lot of time building up our respective decks. Me, playing the French, had by 10.30 performed a successful siege and chased Paul out of Halifax after he had rudely settled in between my two villages...... then just as we were really in the swing of it it was 10.50 and time for Paul to catch his train.... We decided to score the board anyway as neither of us were anywhere near the game ending conditions.

Chris - 55
Paul - 37

Another one that is going to be played next time for sure.

Just one note on anybody thinking of buying this and wanting to do some research on the Geek. There are many threads saying that the game is "broken" and that there is an unstoppable tactic by one of the sides that works every time. Interested though I was I avoided reading them because it would ruin the game. I will probably never stumble across this tactic either so I don't need to know about it......