Times of Crises

Thursday, and with a ring of the bell there appeared three hearty gamers at the door - Andrew, Ian and Joe. Joe had already warned me he would be canvassing to play Time of Crisis, the involved game of a struggle for power in ancient Rome - and Europe - and I had warned Joe that on Thursday we usually avoid evening eaters.

However, whatever he said whilst I was wrangling the boys to bed clearly did the trick, as I returned to find the game in mid set-up, and it seemed churlish to try and veto it at this point. So on we went.

The idea is that all the players are Roman families, advancing their cause throughout Europe and at some point - though neither Ian nor I managed it - rising to become Emperor. How this is achieved is by card drafting in the manner of Dominion; accruing more valuable cards for bigger heft on the board. They key difference though is that rather than dealing yourself a hand, you choose from your available cards, so it's balance between cherry-picking what you need right now and not leaving yourself with a cack hand in the next turn.

Early doors

The cards come in three currencies that help with military might, political advancement, and populist buildings that stop the plebs/barbarians getting out of hand. At the start of each round there's a crisis roll that might see some barbarians invade, or may flip over an event card - which, much like events in life, might be good or bad.

It's a very clever game, but I didn't find it massively intuitive. It makes more sense than, say, Scythe, with it's picky mechs, but the systems at work are less friendly and there's more to juggle in your head. More than once I thought I'd covered what I needed in my hand only to realise I hadn't. But in fairness that's a purely subjective thing, as managing three streams of advancements seemed to be beyond me.

Andrew was first to deal with the barbarians, and Ian was first to attack - me, as it happens, as the game started to show its true colours. It pays to be aggressive here, and as Joe said later, outside of Quantum aggression is not a regular GNN theme.

Naughty Sassanids

Halfway through the game Andrew ascended to the throne - or whatever Emperors sit on - and reigned supreme for about three rounds until Joe voted him out. Meanwhile Ian sent his armies abroad to fight the barbarians and pick up points for doing so. I hummed and hawed around the edges, staring at my cards in the mystified way the cargo tribe once pointed at aeroplanes.

Andrew as emperor, before the dreaded vote

We decided to play to 40 points, rather than the regulation 60, but it still took nearly three and a half hours, by which time I have to say any inclination to ever play it again had pretty much evaporated for me. This sense of frustration was cemented in the final round when crappy dice rolls meant instead of picking up 4 points for battle, I collected none at all, and I was plenty churlish at this point.

But I was in the minority, with Andrew and Ian saying they'd play it again and Joe announcing that he really loved it.

Joe 43 (wins on tie-breaker)
Andrew 43
Ian 41
Sam 36

I'm glad I tried it though, if only to confirm my suspicion that I'm not a GMT player. They are long and involved and I think I'm basically too dim to wring any fun out of them. When everyone else was talking about a barbarian raid at one point, I felt like I was listening to a foreign language, I was so far behind on the cognisance of what was actually going on.

Fortunately for me, everyone agreed to bash out a quick game of Wibbell afterwards. This is a deck of cards that comes with three games, but Wibbell is the headliner, so to speak, and we had a four-player before Joe had to dash off, then a three-player afterwards.

Funtime!

Each card in a deck shows two letters, and when two cards are flipped, the first person to say a word that contains at least one letter on each card (order isn't important) gets one of the cards to themselves. A new card is flipped to make a pair again, and the challenge repeats - but, anyone who has a card (or cards) in front of them must include a letter (or letters) from each of their claimed cards as well. Which means whoever has the most cards has more of a challenge to get to a word, supplying an in-built catch-up mechanism.

It was fun! We all liked this one. I look forward to trying the other games in the deck as well.

Thanks everyone - it was educational!