Late report is late.

On Monday I (Chris) found myself looking after Ashton for the day whilst his school's teachers sat around smoking fistfuls of fags and bitching about the kids in what is more commonly known as an Inset day. It took me until about 10 o'clock to realise decide that my son might really love a trip to Reading. Co-incidently the town also boasts my local games shop, Eclectic Games, what luck!

With the whole range of games on display I couldn't quite get past that itch to play Lords of Waterdeep again and duly left the premises with it stretched into a flimsy plastic bag. Only Paul was due in the evening owing to James' jaunt 'oop north' and Sam had reassured me that it played well with two.

We kicked off the evening with Roll Through The Ages. Paul and I made our customary gallop toward gaining the maximum compliment of cities. Being a dice game luck can be disproportionate and no more so when Paul, all out of wheat, copped a revolt, twice. With something like a minus 24 in disasters come the tally up he was always going to have a mountain to climb.

Final scores
Chris: 41
Paul: 24

On to the main event Lords of Waterdeep and the very satisfying unboxing and separation of components. This game has a lovely feel to it and is 10 quid cheaper than Agricola. A briefest refresher of the rules and we were straight into it, placing 4 agents instead of two which the 5 player gave us last time. Paul quickly set the pace by completing some medium quests and settled on a strategy of more quests the better. I took a more balanced approach but felt that I had wasted too much resource on getting the lieutenant which actually didn't benefit me as much as I'd hoped. I had however, picked up a bunch of cheap plot cards which stay active for the whole game, but as I discovered mid way through Paul had the best one of the lot. Every time he received money he also got a Rogue (black) cube. A fair number of the quests require Rogues and he was off into the distance and in a commanding position and there was little I could do about it as Mandatory Quests were swatted aside with ease.

Despite a nice late rally from me Paul notched a convincing win......

Paul -182
Chris - 162