It was AuZtralia. After being something of a hit at last year's Novocon when Joe's peaceful farming tactic (leaving the battles to the rest of us!) saw him emerge victorious this mash-up of trains, agriculture and Cthulu has lain fallow since, and we felt it was time to return to Oz.
After a quick refresher of some of the rules we began, and beginning in AuZtralia is all about seeding the board with good stuff (iron, coal, gold, phosphorus) and bad (the Old Ones). We were pretty fortunate in how the tiles fell, giving us a landscape of some fairly bad guys, a few pretty bad guys, but almost bereft of really bad guys. As a result, the early moves were all about exploration - build some track here, throw up a farm there, build an airship... and so on. Andrew was first to awaken the Old Ones when his train track bumped into a pyramid.
Combat in AuZtralia borders on funny - there's a luck-pushing mechanism where cards are flipped and you see if you hurt the Old One in question, or they hurt you, or both, or neither. You can retreat, but you can also double-down and, as a result, have all your military units go insane. That happened to me. Mid-game, all the Old Ones started to awaken regardless of whatever noise we were/weren't making, and Zombies staggered over Andrew's farms, blighting them before he retaliated and wiped them out. I seemed comparatively safe for a while, until suddenly a seemingly-indestructible Loyalist nearly made it all the way to my port before expiring.
That near-miss aside though, the Old Ones were never really in with a shout of victory as we tooled up and took them apart. Despite doing most of the dirty work though, Andrew lost out to me courtesy of my train tracks leading me to phosphorus, which are worth 3 points each at the end of the game. An arbitrary and somewhat bizarre decider, really, but in a way appropriate for a game as silly as AuZtralia is.
Sam 26
Andrew 22
It is a bizarre game but replete with adventure and, though at odds with the theme, moments of comedy. Also pretty fast with two...
One can never take photos of Push It because the game moves much too fast, but I beat Andrew something like 21-12 before he then got his own back on his debut of Kariba:
Andrew 27
Sam 21
I should never have scared away the mice.
Ha! I just knocked out a quick blog post of my own while sitting in a pub. I did so only because I liked the punning title I came up with. Here it is...
ReplyDeleteKangaroo caught
Sam and I met up for a little evening of games on the flimsy pretext that I had to return a book he had lent me not just realising it was from the library. I mean, since I was round his house anyway...
But what to play? The usual suspects were considered: Macao, Railways of The World, Heaven and Ale. But when Sam suggested Auztralia, I agreed thinking it would be best to play it again before we needed a rule refresher.
It turns out we were a bit late, and a rules refresher was indeed needed but it didn't take long before we were camped on the shores of a post apocalyptic Australia. Sam stationed himself near lots of gold and I preferred metal and coal.
It was a fairly tame game. Most of the enemies that revealed themselves were either pyramids, which didn't move and threaten our farms, or kangaroos. There were three of these in total, two of which were among the level two enemies (or Old Ones, to give then their proper name) . Quite a stroke of luck.
Those enemies that did appear (zombies and loyalists, mostly) played merry havoc while they were active. Both Sam and I saw our network of farms under attack and, at one point, my port was within reach of an Old One, but it didn't move that turn and I killed it the next chance I had.
I was first to turn to warfare and I picked up my favourite dream team of Airship engineers, Xhu Ziang and Juliet Verne, alongside a General Takanashi (sp?) which allowed my military units to go out in a blaze of glory, giving two damage points but wiping themselves out in the process.
But Sam's resources of gold allowed him to build artillery and plenty of infantry. He soon had a pile of dead enemies in front of him, despite losing his entire army at one point due to a fit of insanity.
It ended all too soon. Cthulu had lost, despite having had the advantage of a soundtrack made by searching for "Cthulu" on Spotify. Sam had beaten me though, in a close battle that ended in the high twentysomethings.
It was great to revisit this game and remind ourselves of its strong sense of narrative. It was a lot of fun and really quite tense at times when the Old Ones were on the prowl. We can be grateful that the tiles were so kind to us allowing us some precious breathing space later in the game so we could get some supplies or pick up a new recruit.
Then I asked for a rematch on Push It. After last time's close call, I felt the need to redress the balance. Well, that plan backfired spectacularly as Sam beat me 21 points to maybe 15, if I'm being generous.
Finally we played Kariba, an old Knizia game repackaged to look like an Oink game. This tiny game was a lot of fun and quite devious. And it gave me my only win of the evening.
I wrapped up there and, making sure I had actually handed over the book I was supposed to bring, I set off home. Thanks for a fun evening, Sam. I'll leave the last words to my auto complete regarding Sam and I...
"Sam and I will be back at about quarter to seven."
Great. Well done, phone.
Ha that’s great! A double post from either side is f the table... I think yours tells the story better. Thanks Andrew it was lots of fun’
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