Kickstarter Interesting Projects #2 (4th Feb ’14) – oddball Aeronauts, Tiny Epic Kingdoms & This Town Aint Big Enough for the 2-4 of us!

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It’s been a while since I decided to post about kickstarter projects I’ve backed, but this month there seems to be lots of low-cost ones that are very interesting, and I just happen to feel like saying something about them!

Tiny Epic Kingdoms

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/coe/tiny-epic-kingdoms/

This is the biggest of the 3, (amusingly, as they’re all ‘micro’ sized), and wraps up 4 days from now. Tiny Epic Kingdoms has you playing of one of a variety of races to prove your dominance in the smallest 4X game I’ve seen.

Players compete to try and be the best at a variety of key areas in order to ultimately prove themselves the best. They can try to expand their population across the map, discover powerful magic, build colossal towers or battle their way forward in the name of victory. These are tiny kingdoms nonetheless, and there’s simply not enough room which should make for some interesting interactions between players as they vie for resources.

The guys making this game have done an amazing job of advertising it and getting information on it out there, and managed to get my attention a good while before the project even started. The shipping isn’t great, and there’s a risk of customs charges, but the components look lovely and there’s a huge amount of factions gained from being a backer to provide lots of variety in a game that will be lovely to take anywhere. Take a look for yourself! ^^.
oddball Aeronauts: Pirates vs the Pendragon

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lloydashpyne/oddball-aeronauts-pirates-vs-the-pendragon?ref=live

Next along in size is a card game that if you don’t look close enough could be dismissed as a top-trumps derivative. That would be a mistake however, as this game looks to be remarkably deep and a very interesting game for 2 players to enjoy just about anywhere. I’ll try to explain a little, but I’d urge you to watch Richard Hams (rahdo) Runthrough of the game on youtube to really get a good idea of it. The campaign ends on the 3rd March so plenty time for you to decide ^^.

Each turn players go at each other by comparing 3 statistics on their cards (Sailing, Boarding and Cannons), the interesting bit being that you can use up to the top 3 cards of your deck for the comparison, and that number is  done simultaneously, with all the cards used being lost as ‘damage’. Cards also have abilities that can be manipulated to try and make your way to victory. There are also event cards in each players deck that can change things up, and introduce yet more strategy to the game in trying to set yourself up to win those events.

Looks great, and I’m looking forward to receiving it later this year. £15 shipped to anywhere is pretty nice too.
This Town Aint Big Enough for the 2-4 of us!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaelmindes/this-town-aint-big-enough-for-the-2-4-of-us-pwyw?ref=live

Finally, the latest micro-game from TMG, in their pay what you want with $3 minimum format, is this carcassonne-in-appearance tile placement game, Players put town tiles with various ‘brands’ on them which represent each player in the game, and when an area is completely fenced in, it gets scored. The cool bit is that each player in that area scores based on the next lowest number in that area, so if you have 4 brands and another player has 2, you get 2 points and they get 0 (As below them is no-one).

The game comes with 24 tiles, and maybe more when stretch goals are hit, which looks to provide a lot of fun in a small package. It’s also possible that multiple sets might work combined, as backers suggested, to which the games designer is play-testing now in response to peoples inquiries. I hope it works well as I’d happily pick up a few with them being so cheap for each copy ^^. The project has another 9 days in it, and is already nearly double it’s goal with only 1 day on the site so far, definitely worth a look as it costs barely more than lunch! ^^.

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Thanks for your time and such, I hope you’ve found something interesting to back here! I think oddball Aeronauts looks the most interesting, as it should lead to some great 2-player gaming opportunities when I’m with my girlfriend Grace. The others look amazing too though, else they wouldn’t be nicking a cut of my budget for games this year, so I recommend you go for them all ^^>

Halesowen Board Gamers #2 (22/01/14)

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I bought 4 games this week – Euphoria, Viticulture, Archon: Glory & Machination and Professor Pugnacious. I arrived a little later than usual, and numbers meant we ended up doing 2-Player runs at the first pair of the games I bought along.

First up was Euphoria. The guy I was playing with, Stan, has recently bought the game and was interested in trying it out to see how it plays and get a feel for the game. I was more than happy to oblige, seeing as this is one of my absolute favourite games ^^.

I kickstarted Euphoria back in June ’13 after watching the project for a while and being interested because it had cool looking dice. I really like steampunk, well, stuff in general, and the dice looked great so I was hoping to be able to pick a set up without worrying about the game! Sitting on a project by Jamey makes it extremely difficult to resist, as he’s hugely enthusiastic and communicative, so I took a longer look at the game, I changed my pledge to be for the supreme edition (Extra dice!) and went in. (I also obtained my viticulture kick-starter edition through a charity auction by Jamey, which I found out about through the Euphoria project.

Euphoria plays out in a dystopian Universe where the majority of the worlds population has been wiped out. The remaining people live in and around the city of Euphoria, being kept in the dark by the upper echelons to maintain their lifestyle and keep things as they are. These people are split into 4 factions, that each control particular resources necessary to live in this post-apocalyptic world.

The Euphorians are those that live in the golden city and manage it’s generators to provide energy. The Subterrans live beneath the city in the sewers and pipeworks, where they have control over the water supply. The Wastelanders live outside the city, with control over the farmlands. Finally, the Icarans are the denizens of the sky, who harvest a resource called ‘bliss’, i.e. a drug to keep workers happy!

As you play the game, you send your workers out to the various places to gather commodities, resources and artifacts which can ultimately be used to exert your influence/authority over the city. The first to place 10 authority tokens claims control over the city and wins the game.

Earlier in the game I focused in large part on pushing the allegiance tracks up for my active (Wastelander) and hidden (Subterran) recruit, the former to obtain more commodities/resources for various actions, and the latter to try and unlock an extra ability and potentially star later in the game. I worked out reasonably quickly that Stan was also trying to slowly push up the waste-lander track, so I surmised that was his hidden recruits faction and left it to go slow and focus on the Subterran track.

The first market of the game was a joint effort, as I saw Stan stockpiling gold and quickly went for a piece myself so I couldn’t get locked out of the market he went for. The second went to me, as I gathered some stone with the water I was getting from pushing the subterran allegiance track, then made use of a double to take a market in one turn. (The negative made Scott lose a commodity or resource when he rolled a 1). The 3rd went solely to Stan and meant I couldn’t join a market he’s started, 4th to me (I think) which made 5’s negatively impact Stan  too, and 5th to Stan was another construction site limit, which didn’t affect me too much. Stan got hit a lot harder from the negatives from me, although he did have at least 1 opportunity to have locked me out from a market which he missed out on, likely as it was his first game ^^.

By the end of the game, we actually finished very close on scores, with Stan having 1 star left as I used up my last (he was ahead of me for a little while, but I managed to get 2 pairs of artifacts for a leap in progress). Good game!

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No-one else looked likely to finish another game soon, so I offered up Viticulture as Stan had mentioned he was interested in it sometime, and I wanted to play it ^^. I talked about the game in my last Halesowen post, so I’ll go straight into how the game went.

I got an early windmill which worked well through the game, with Stan getting Irrigation/trellis fairly early to open up planting options. My first plant got me a 3red/3white field, which turned out to be extremely useful over the game.

My first wine order was for a 5 value red, nice and easy, which I got by letting a 3 age for a couple of years, the 2nd that I picked up was a 2red/2white and got completed first in the end. I feel lucky to have gotten 2 easy orders. Stans first order filled was a 3red/4red. After that I’m a little hazy, but Stan managed to keep close to me on the residual money track each game.

For buildings, I mostly had the lead, likely because it was Stans first game so he couldn’t see what was useful until he saw me get the benefits. I went Windmill > Irrigation > Med. Cellar > Trellis > Yoke > Large Cellar > Tasting Room (Only got the last as I had some money in the last year and it was a way to nab an extra VP). Stans I think was Irrigation > Trellis > Med Cellar > Yoke > Windmill > Large Cellar > Tasting Room. Stan got his tasting room straight after me on the last year so he didn’t get to reap the benefits unfortunately.

Early game I went ahead on points, mostly thanks to my windmill, but as we neared the end Stan managed to catch up putting us head to head ~15. At that point however I had a half full crush pad while he’d used up every single grape/wine token he had. In the 2nd to last year I grabbed some wine orders as well as blocking the harvest action to maintain my advantage, and in the last got an order filled, as well as 2VP from a visitor and 1 from the tasting room I’d built. The game ended 23-17 with my victory.

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All in all it was a very fun evening of games – It’s interesting how much more you remember/pay attention to in a 2 player for playing strategically, even when a game scales well up to 6 ^^. Looking forward to next week as a couple people sounded interested in Archon, and hopefully on the 5th Eldritch Horror (I know both Ian/Dave-D are interseted in that).

Thanks for reading

Halesowen Board Gamers #1

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I’ve decided to start doing a separate update for ‘general things’ and Halesowen games, as I think those of you that go there each week are likely more interested in just reading about what I did at the night ^^, so this seemed a convenient idea.

So anyway, on Wednesday I came along with Viticulture, Euphoria & Machine of death, and the first of that set got played (Yay!). Viticulture is a game I picked up totally on a whim through a charity auction from Stonemaier Games – I wasn’t particularly into worker-placements at the time, and I don’t like wine, I just felt the company seemed really interesting and wanted to try out their earlier game (I was supporting Euphoria on kick-starter at the time).

As it turns out, the game is absolutely great, and dragged me way more into worker-placement games than I was! The game plays out in years, with each year having 4 unique seasons to achieve tasks. Between years players grapes/wines ‘age’, increasing in value, making even low quality product become useful in time. You also get income each year based on wine-orders that you’ve set up your vineyard to fulfill.

In Spring, players choose a play-order, with larger bonus’s the later you go. In Summer players can build up their vineyard, gaining money, building useful structures and planting vines. In Autumn players just gain a Summer or Winter themed ‘Visitor card’ which can be played in their respective times of the year (By placement) for useful effects. In Winter players capitalize on their vineyard, harvesting grapes, crushing them and filling orders, as well as gaining workers for the next year.

The game is great, and I’m happy to have it and to have been able to introduce some of you at Halesowen to it. The players in our game were Me, Dave F, James & Andy (Sorry I don’t know last initials, should be on Dave D’s blog though!).

My focus in the game was to try and get a tasting room as a consistent victory points source, with a couple of low-quality setup fields that I could use to get grapes and leave them to age. I managed to get these things setup fairly early through a pair of visitor cards letting me sacrifice points for money & building (So I was on -4 ^^). Getting the tasting room so early let me capitalize on it through the years and undo the negatives I took to get it, and as it triggers from getting money it helped me get other buildings too.

I don’t remember what the other players went for exactly, but:James: Took an extra worker a lot, got a windmill but didn’t manage to use it as much as he wanted.
Dave:  Vines/Order Focused (i think), didn’t notice any special buildings on his.
Andy: Got a lot of money over the game, not sure where he spent it though!

In the end I took victory, with Dave/Andy close behind and James in last place, although I don’t think he was too far back. Apologies I don’t remember how things went properly, I’ll try harder next time ^^.

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Afterwards, we had time for a quick game while waiting for others to finish and sync for heading home after. We went with Carcassonne as it’s a lovely game and easy to fit into 20-30 minute gaps of time. I very early went for a field as it was looking to get a lot of small cities in it, and focused on keeping it throughout the game. Dave also put a lot into trying to steal the field from me (We ended up drawing 4-4 to take it), while the others focused on cities/roads.

For a lot of the game people seemed to worry my field would get me the victory, but in the end it just wasn’t enough, and the amount of workers Dave made me use to keep control of it meant I never got many other points. Scores should be on Dave-D’s blog, but spoilers, I didn’t win.

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Thanks for a great night again to all halesowen board game attendee’s! =)

Weekly Update #4 – Edale, Halesowen & Games with Friends

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I had a lot of fun this last week, with a rather short holiday up to the start of the Pennine Way and a few games here and there.

Edale

Last week my girlfriend went up to Edale for some volunteering work in a hostel. She suggested I could come down at the end of the week and well, that sounded like a great idea! I booked Friday off work so I could get there earlier and went for the longest drive I’ve managed since getting my car a few months ago. While uneventful, it’s certainly quite an experience and had me appreciated service stations that little bit more ^^.

On the Friday evening we played a few games of various things, including Qwirkle and Eldritch Horror that I got fairly recently. I got my ass kicked in Qwirkle, and we got our asses kicked in Eldritch Horror! It was a lot of fun playing games somewhere with pretty much noone else around, certainly makes for an awesome atmosphere with EH ^^. The next day we walked a few hours along the Pennine way, including up Jacobs Ladder before deciding to head back before it got too dark for dinner and to have time to head home. All in all I had a great time and I’m glad I decided to go, even if it was for just one day =)

Halesowen Board Gamers

On Wednesday was board games in Halesowen, a regular meetup that I intend to try to go to every week. I took along a few games, and we played Legacy: Gears of Time & Among the Stars out of them. I’m eager to play Legacy many more times, as the time travel theme is just awesome and I like how the scoring works (Primitive technologies score points when more complex ones make use of them!). Among the Stars is great, although I wasn’t really careful enough in setting up so there was some cards in the set which didn’t work (Expansion references for cards we weren’t using), oops! I’ll be more careful in future, as it’s a great game and hiccups like that for  new players is a shame.

Games with Friends

Last night I headed over to a friends house for a couple of games. I wanted to try Machine of Death as the kickstarter had just arrived, and while I enjoyed playing a round the others didn’t, but it at least gave me an idea of the kind of group I need to get together for it ^^. After that we had a game of Among the Stars, where I managed to net a narrow victory with a nice array of Ambassadors, followed by Galaxy Trucker with various expansion things from their anniversary edition. It was a lot of fun playing with Rough Roads included as while I have the Anniversary Edition too, I rarely play with experienced players who are willing to put up with its’ evil ^^.

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Shelves Run Through #2

As I got a decent number of games from kickstarter/christmas/birthday since I did a video of my shelves, I decided to redo it. There’s a few random skips where I got distracted and paused recording for a moment, but it should be ok. Check that out here:

Thanks for reading, happy gaming all =)

Christmas! and Birthday! and New Year! and Stuff!

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Been a little while since I updated, partly as I’ve not been going to any board-gaming events to particularly talk about! Which is odd, because I have lots of games received over Christmas/Birthday to talk about ^^.

Christmas

Just before Christmas I visited my girlfriend in Brighton to see her and her family over the holidays. I had a great time while there, getting to know her brother better (I’ve only briefly met him before) and generally enjoying some free time spent with Grace. A particular highlight was the laughing horse comedy event in town which had some good things on offer, ending in an awesome show by a particularly loud chap who well..didn’t need a microphone to say the least ^^.

On the 24th I got the train back at 7:10AM. No..no wait that’s not what happened, I planned to do that…but a huge quantity of trains were cancelled and it took me most of the day to get even as far as Gatwick! In the end I was fortunate enough to be given a lift most of the way back to Birmingham, with my Dad picking me up somewhere around the halfway point. I got back after 10pm, :(

Fortunately though, I did manage to get home so I was able to spend Christmas with my family, which is more than worth it to see my Mum happy at having all her kids back home! I had a good day with great food and many gifts. Among them were Eldritch Horror (Thanks Mum & Dad), Belfort (Thanks Grandma & Grandad) and Steam Noir: Revolution (Thanks Tori, aka Sister!). I also got the usual assortment of socks, sweets and my big gift of the year, a Tom Tom! Very useful as I’ve been borrowing my Grandad’s temporarily and it’s lovely to have my own and be able to return his ^^.

As a conveniently timed present to myself, a few kickstarters I backed arrived (I paid ages ago…it feels like getting extra gifts ^^). Among the Stars: The Ambassadors, Archon: Glory & Machination, Shadows over the Empire and DrunkQuest: The 90 Proof Seas wormed their way into my collection!

Birthday

The very last day of each year also happens to be my day of birth. When I was at school I used to get frustrated as many of my friends stayed at home with family, but as I’ve gotten older and people have stopped accepting their parents demands, I’ve had friends over more often for the day and importantly, for new years with close friends!

In the Morning my parents came over to where I live to bring the wonders of cake and a couple of gifts in the form of yet more socks and…Legacy: Gears of Time! This was a great start to the day as I’ve been looking forward to getting Legacy as I love all things Time Travel!

In the Afternoon, my friends Chris, Chris, Ken, Grant & my girlfriend Grace (Who’d come back from Brighton for my Birthday <3)  went to Laser Quest (Because we’re grown up like that) and had a great time repeatedly shooting the younger generation with lasers. I did poorly one game, ok in another and came 1st on my team (I.e. The winning team) in the last, yay!

After coming home we had copious amounts of food and played a game of paranoia for the adventure stealth train. It was a lot of fun (Though Grace didn’t enjoy it so much, unfortunately) and I got to finally complete a secret mission in the game (Don’t really play often mind)…right before being blown up – Someone else also completed their mission! We proceeded to play DrunkQuest into the evening, which turns out to be an awesome drinking game, that has similar mechanics to Munchkin, but with the advantage that drinking makes the hate go away! Hugely fun and I’m looking forward to a situation where we play again!

We hadn’t finished the game when we took a hiatus to celebrate the New Year & watch the fireworks. My friend Emma even got involved (She couldn’t back it) by means of phone call, to the clamour of hearing us yell the countdown to the New Year, it was nice for her to be involved even if not in person ^^. I also shouldn’t miss out that in the evening I got to try out the super awesome cake that Grace made for me – Iron Man in cake form, so cool! This as well as some steampunk fairy cakes from my Mum – I Still haven’t worked my way through all the cake!

New Year

So that brings us to 2014, Happy New Year to all! Had a reasonably relaxed time so far with a good bit of gaming on Sunday at Afternoon Play and at a friends house after. I’ve gotten to play all the games I got over the festive period (Sort of) and look forward to talking about them more next update (I was going to in this one…but getting long at over 800 words!)

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Thanks for reading, and if you skipped to the end, a Happy New Year to you too!

Weekly Update #3 – Halesowen Boardgamers, Dragoons Den & Other

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What? This is 2 weeks after the last update? Heresy, you shall be slain for such accusations…Oh wait, yeah I missed a week, but noone’s reading this blog anyway =)

Sunday 15th – Dragoons Den

I first-timed another board game group since my last update, called ‘Dragoons Den’ which is set up in the Moseley all services venue in er..Moseley. I’ve not really been sure whether to go as I haven’t heard many people bringing it up and I also haven’t been able to reach it until I recently got a car. My girlfriend Grace went home to Brighton for a couple of weeks (I’m going to visit tomorrow!) on the 14th so I had nothing to do on Sundays which I usually reserve for spending time with her – This seemed like a fun alternative.

On arrival there was a group started on ‘Black Gold’ and a group who’d just finished a game and were happy to invite me over for something instead of whatever their other plan was (I think they had a game lined up which was 4p and I made it 5). We had a few games of Coup, which was my first time playing and which turned out to be very easy to pick up. I’ve come to realise recently that I don’t find myself overly fond of deduction games despite a frenzied interest a short while back, as I like to be able to sit back and well, have some privacy I guess (Despite being in a game,..it’s weird), but in these games people are eying you up and asking you questions and I don’t always respond as I should. Anyway Simon won the first and last game, with me getting a neat victory on the second pretty much by being my quiet self and noone paying me much attention ^^.

Afterwards we played Euphoria, with a full complement of 6 for the first time! It was a lot of fun and while I didn’t win, I’m super happy to have gotten another ‘player count’ in of the game, as it takes me closer to feeling I can give it a good review. I’ve done a session report here:

http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1087717/chriss-sessions-game-with-6

Line Dice, Zombie Dice & Timeline Run Through + Shelves

On the 16th I was mostly occupied but found some time to do a run through video of some shorter games. I’d prefer to have done something bigger, but from experience with the Euphoria one I’ll need lots of time for trial runs before I get it done, and this seemed a nice option. I also did a ‘shelf porn’  walkthrough with short descriptions/comments on each of the games on my shelf.

Halesowen Board Gamers

I made a second visit to the Halesowen board gamers group on Wednesday evening, although this time my friends were already home for Christmas so I went along on my own. There were 6 others at the event and all were in games as I arrived. Thanks to a remarkably short game of Zombicide (Half an hour, they died :P) I was able to join 2 people and play a couple of games.

First up was Small World Underground, which I’ve not played in 6+ months I think. It was a lot of fun and I’m glad it was suggested, as I’ve shied away from this game for a while as noone really seemed to want to play, happy to see that view challenged. I lost, as I stuck to my Mummies the entire game and never used their power (They’re just cool!), with mike coming first & mark in second.

After that we looked for something a little shorter and after having a couple of other suggestions I noticed Carcassonne and had a sudden burst of desire to try it out. There was a good reaction to that though as apparently it’s a well liked game and the others were happy to play. I don’t really know how to say what my tactic in the game was, but I got a huge area with a farmer in and netted plenty of points from it to stop myself being too far behind the others. In the end Mike had 100-something, Mark 94 & me 89. Looking forward to playing again sometime in the future!

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So this week hasn’t been quite so game-filled, and to be honest I don’t know where my times gone. Yesterday was a bit of a shambles which I shan’t bring up for now, but nevermind ^^. Christmas is less than a week away and tis’ time to get into the Christmas Spirit.

I probably won’t be posting again till afterwards…so
MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

Weekly Update #2 – Halesowen Board Gamers & Euphoria

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So, in the first 8 days that I’ve owned Euphoria, I’ve played 7 times. I think that’s definitely the sign of a great game! In this post I plan to Summarize how they’ve gone, mention a few other games played and generally cheer that I found a new tabletop society to go to on Wednesdays!

Back on Wednesday last week I got my first couple of plays done in the evening. Some friends came over, so we have me, Chris, Chris & Adam. Or by initials CJS, CJH, CJH…Er..Me, Handy, Harrison & Adam, lets go with that. I got explanation out of the way pretty quickly and we got into our games and had a lot of fun. Adam found a great tactic quite early and managed to pull ahead with his Icarus allegiance and win the first game. In the second game things felt a bit tighter with us knowing rather than guessing what we were doing, Harrison managed to make good use of recruits and take the lead. I had ‘lose a worker’ recruits in at least one of the games and well, losing a worker hurts!

On Friday I went along to the UoB tabletop society for just the 1 game of Euphoria before I headed back home to join friends who wanted to play Battlestar Galactica. In the game of Euphoria I got asked a lot more questions this time, which I think was because my thematic explanation was a bit fractured and made people ask a lot of questions about it, which is a bit frustrating when it doesn’t actually affect the game. Anyway people had a lot of fun and Ian commented that he wants to play again sometime (Harrison won again, as he was about too and enjoys the game ^^). The game of battlestar galactica afterwards was quite fun, but to be honest I find the length of the game too much, when you consider how heavy the landslide is when the second round of loyalty cards goes out – I don’t enjoy going from ‘a chance’ to ‘haha you’ve lost’, but what can you do…:(

I had another game of Euphoria, this time with 2, on the 7th. I had a lot less fun this game but fortunately I managed to work out the reason afterwards which was an incorrect rule! We were doing the markets wrong so they weren’t really contestable, which meant the winner of the game was obvious a long time before the end and took out all the tension. No problems as correcting the rule makes it better. In the evening me, Grace, and my housemates Ken & Ruth had games of Dixit (Ken Won), Timeline (Ruth Won) and Love Letter (Ruth Won), there’s not much I can say about these as they’re pretty straightforward games, but we had a lot of fun!

On Sunday I played games of Legendary & Forbidden Desert with Ken in the day, and Euphoria 2 player with Grace in the evening. Forbidden Desert we absolutely kicked ass, winning with no worry of things going wrong at all (I didn’t even have to visit a water location, thanks to finding a canteen along the way). In Legendary we beat up Mephisto despite his valiant efforts to open Portals to the dark dimension, with Ken punching his face a few more times than me and taking the victory. With Euphoria in the evening I won the first game, as a result of Grace missing a rule that I didn’t pick up on (How the numbers on commodity locations work). The game after Grace took victory with me not too far behind, so at this point I’d pretty much lost 5/5 as I discounted the game before where only I knew how to play properly ^^.

On Monday/Tuesday I did something related to board games but not playing them! I recorded a ‘run through’ of the game in the hope that people can watch it and learn to play the game – Something I much prefer doing as opposed to reading rulebooks (Well, I read those too, but it’s hard to match rulebook to actually playing sometimes ^^). Monday was just a few failed attempts, and on Tuesday I got a whole video recorded (40 minutes!) with just a couple of breaks when people came into the room as I couldn’t bring myself to keep going when that happened ^^. I got the video posted overnight and some great feedback from the Euphoria forum on boardgamegeek yesterday, positive feedback in fact! I’m so happy that people liked the video as now I’m super-motivated to do more.

Halesowen Board Gamers

Well, this wasn’t any longer than any of the other sessions I had, but this is a new society I came across that I’m quite excited about! This group meet up every Wednesday evening in an upstairs room in a pub, which is really well lit and has lots of room, not to mention being remarkably quiet. I’m so glad to have found it and taken the chance as being a pub I was unsure ^^.

I took Grace & Harrison with me as I love playing games with them and partly because I wanted people I know there for confidence reasons ^^. I had Euphoria with me so I suggested that and after a short while found a couple of people to join me and Grace for a game while Harrison went off to play Power Grid (Which I believe he enjoyed). I got a bit focused on my own strategies in Euphoria to know what the other 3 were going for, but with a recruit that let me use any resource for construction sites I focused on construction of markets. As a result I made a lot of use of the Euphorian tunnel and had a beautiful stack of gold to work with. Thanks to limiting other players actions by the market negatives I was pushing out, and perhaps by finally having grasped the way the game works, I took the victory by a few points lead!

Afterwards me, Grace & the other 2 (James & Jamie I believe was their names) played a game of King of Tokyo as we needed something fairly quick to fill the time. While the others tried to balance going into Tokyo and getting other things, I just sat back and went for points with no idea if it was a good plan. Apparently it was, as after 20 minutes or so 2 of the other players had wiped themselves out, with the last being in Tokyo with 2 health. For the first time in the game I just went straight for damage and got the 2 I needed to take the win. Yay!

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Fun Week! I hope things continue being this packed with gaming ^^.

Weekly Update #1, Afternoon Play, A Table & Euphoria!

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Not that anyone reads this blog, but I think I need a better name for general updates than tagging them all as ‘random musings’, lets go the boring route and call it ‘Weekly Update #X’ =)

So what’s happened in the past week? A few things actually, resulting in my being a bit lacking in sleep! I really need to get a handle on the fact that knowing I need to be asleep by 10pm doesn’t make the early hours of the Morning an ok substitute.

On Thursday I went out into Birmingham for my friend Emma’s birthday. I met up with people in the Christmas market for food, beer and merriment! We had lots of fun and after a while headed to ‘The Brew Dog’ where I’ve not been before, but is a cool place with lots of interesting beers. Too many beers, and confusingly not sold in pints, why do places sell beers in halves/thirds, that’s just wrong! It was lovely to see some people that I’ve only met up with once or twice in the past year, and a couple of new people too, great night!
Friday I went to the University of Birmingham tabletop society after work, taking along a handful of games to play. A few of us got together and played a game of Quarriors (I think I won, yay!), although that was all as I went for an early night with my lovely gf.

Sunday I went to Afternoon Play with Grace, where we met up with one of Grace’s housemates from last year and a couple of his friends (One who I had met and one I hadn’t). It was quite nice to go to the event and play board games with people I don’t see very often ^^. On arrival we played a game of Resistance: Avalon with 10 players (Which we lost..I need to speak up when I think a mission is dumb rather than just vote no..). We then moved to a pub from the cafe (Same society) and played Frag and Byzantio. The former of which is a quake-3 style board game which seemed heavily based on luck, and the latter is one of my games that I was wanting to play more, with hidden information and area control. Awesome night!
On Monday I didn’t seem to find time for much asides from a trip to IKEA with my housemate Ken. It’s the first time I’ve been there and to be honest, I’m disappointed nothing caught my eye ^^. The trip was to buy a table though, which Ken took care of, so we headed home with the lovely new flatpack of the table to build that evening. Of course we then realized we didn’t have a screwdriver (Asides from one on a gerber multitool which wasn’t good enough). We gave in and had a game of zombicide on the upside-down tabletop on the floor, as we’d already decided we were going to play a game on the new table ^^.

Last night I went to my parents for dinner and to pick up a delivery. That delivery was Euphoria, a game which I’m super excited about and can’t wait to play (Hence going and fetching it ^^). I also picked up a few screwdrivers so we found some time to put the table together too (Yay!). Unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to play a game, but I did get the components out to have a look, they’re so pretty! Love the stretch goal upgrades ^^. The plan is to get it played this evening, which a few friends are coming over for. Now we just need to get some chairs for the table…hmm ^^ (They’re so expensive though -_-)

So that was my week! Not bad I think, but I do need to try and get more sleezzzzzzzZzzZzzzZZzzzZz…

Random Musings #3 – Gifts

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Despite where Christmas originally came from, a disproportionate part of it these days if gifts. Regardless of whether you show your love for friends and family in other ways, the giving of gifts tends to be almost a requirement at this time of the year.

It isn’t of course, and I know probably just as many people who’d rather not be given a present (or obligation as some would call it ^^) as would. Personally I just love to give friends and family gifts at this time of the year and strive to do so far as many people as possible, limited by what I can spend before going completely bankrupt! I thought I’d dedicate this post to being about presents and such in general.

Family

This is always the hardest one, as while I love my family, I simply do not know what kind of things they would want or need! With my parents it’s difficult because they simply have more money than me. If there’s something they want or need that I could afford it’s very likely they already have it! With my siblings it’s more that I don’t know well enough what they might want as we don’t have enough in common (Plus I don’t see them often enough). As a result I tend to just quite directly ask what people would like for Christmas, and after being redirected a few times (Ask your sister/ask mum/ask…etc) come up with something small that’s not usually very unique, but means I can get them something they want and make them that much happier on Christmas day!

Last year I tried to do something a little more special, and didn’t just get what I was told I should, at least on for my Mum & Sister. I went on shapeways.com instead and found a cute dragon for my Mum and a Pendant for my Sister that I thought they’d like (I think I was right :P). I got a couple of other things too, and went with standard fare of ‘sweets, socks and the like’ for my Dad, but felt so much happier than many Christmas’s that I’d found something that little bit more unique!

This year I don’t feel confident enough in how much money I have (Due to getting a car) which is a shame as I’d love to do something similar. Instead I’ve gone with asking what people would like and will try to pick a gift for each that will cause the biggest smile possible anyway. Next year I hope to save up a little to go with shape-ways again, or some other such custom gift (Perhaps I could learn to design my own 3D models to get printed for them!)

Friends

Friends are much easier to buy presents for, mostly because they don’t expect it and no matter what you give it’s a surprise! Last year and this year I’m prowling dayoftheshirt.com to find unique design t-shirts that fit the people I’m buying for. This is such a fun option as it’s usually <£10 each and with themes that my friends will love.

On the other hand it does feel a bit more awkward, as while I don’t expect things in return, it’s possible to make a person feel extremely guilty by doing this and it’s not the reaction I want! I don’t know how to get around that other than not buying them things, but that doesn’t feel an option to me, I want my friends to get cool things from me! Awkward ^^

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Eurgh, I feel like all that was a bit lame, so I’m going to stop right here! I hope I manage to get people great things despite a tight budget (And have some ordered already!) and give out some smiles this Christmas!

Random Musings #2 (Christmas Soon!)

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I like the idea of calling posts ‘random musings’ because it gives me an excuse to type nonsense as a way of delaying until I final get around to thinking of something that’s actually interesting to read to someone, maybe. Lets just go with an update on board games for the past week.

Friday – UoB Tabletop Gaming Society

I try to go to the society at the University I live by every Friday. Sadly I’m no longer a student but as I still enjoy going, I’ve taken to the idea of driving over there as soon as I finish work at 5 to play games until the late evening (2-7 was normal, but people stay around till around 11 if I go, particularly as I bring more games than the society gets out themselves ^^). Anyway we had time for a couple of games last Friday although I always wish I could fit in more.

First up was Kings of Air and Steam. There was 6 people about and we were trying to decide on a game when a 7th walked in and it immediately settled the matter, as this was the only one going to that player count. I’m really happy about that as I love this game and it’s better with more players, plus I’ve now been able to introduce most of the regular Friday tabletop people to it so future plays will have less teaching! It was a tight game between 6 of us, with 1 of those 6 being a dirty pirate and using his steal money/goods powers to good effect. The 7th managed to sneakily find a corner where noone bothered him much, and shot out to a ridiculous lead, leaving it 200-something to 100-120 for the rest of us. I came last, as tends to happen with KoAaS as I make a lot of mistakes while teaching (It’s hard to remember to upgrade your airship when you get asked 6+ questions a turn ^^). In the end though it was a fun mess and I loved it anyway!

For the second game of the night we split into 2 groups. 3 went for a MtG variant called commander (I think, 100 card pre-set decks) and the other 4 of us went for Among the Stars. This a brilliant drafting game that plays out like a strongly thematic and much more exciting version of 7 wonders, where we act as various races building space stations for some post-war peace ideal. I went for an odd shape designed to let me get high points from adjacency cards (Lots of gaps for those cards as I went) which confused the new players a lot, while they were being more confined. In the end I almost won, but got edged out by a little thing we very nearly missed, I think credits to vp. It was great fun and I enjoyed having a transporter heavy secure station with some totally peaceful huge gun emplacements. Can’t wait to try it with the expansion, and up to 6 players!

Sunday – Apres Essen Goodie Con (Telford)

The brilliant UK online gaming store gameslore held an event in Belmont Hall in Telford in Sunday, where they had a few new games from Essen available to play as well as a few for sale. I couldn’t resist the temptation, and also wanted to go in part as motorway practice in case I need to go longer distances sometime (I’ve been driving for 2.5 weeks). My lovely girlfriend Grace joined me and we headed over in the early afternoon for a few hours of gaming, which we managed to fit just the 1 longer game and 2 smaller ones (1 of which we gave up on as it was kinda lame ^^).

The longer game was Spyrium, a worker placement game that came out recently with an interesting worker placement mechanism based around a 3×3 grid of cards. When you place a worker, you put it between 2 of these cards, and when you move into your activation phase (Stop placing workers) to use/obtain one of them. One caveat though is that the cost to obtain/use a card (obtain is buildings that you take off the grid, use is people that can be used multiple times) is increased by 1 for each other worker around that card. The result is that a valuable looking card soon becomes too expensive. During activation you can retrieve a worker around a card to gain 1 money for each other worker their instead of using it, so you can also use these heavily contested cards as a money generator. I tried to go for the lesser buildings that generated spyrium/converted it to victory points rather than competing for the high cost cards, coming in 3rd/5. We had to learn the game before/while playing so I don’t know much about what everyone else did unfortunately, I do hope to play again sometimes but I won’t be buying this one!

Game 2 was a game with a few dice (18 D6 in 3 colours, and 1 special big dice) and some imps, you roll the big dice to work out what you are doing (Take the colour of imp the same as dice closest to the die, or take the imp the same colour as the highest die rolled). This ended up being lame as hell because it took so little time to work out the simple ideals that it was more of a ‘I can grab it faster’ than ‘I can work it out faster’, we gave up about halfway through despite it only being a 5-10 minute game, bleh.

Finally we had a game of Eight Minute Empire. I’ve been quite intrigued by this game since I came across it on kickstarter but didn’t back at the time as I wasn’t convinced it could work and didn’t really research it. We were in need of a quick game though as were time limited, and I picked it from the table of stuff provided for trying. We played the basic game but had a good 8 minutes of fun (Maybe 10, the game lies!) with us all going for slightly different tactics. I won with 11 points by a sneaky move at the end taking control of the island to the bottom left, although I’m not sure how tactical the game really was, maybe with a few plays (Which wouldn’t take long to be fair!). If I see this in a FLGS or on kickstarter with another expansion/sequel maybe I’ll pick it up!

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I mentioned Christmas in the post title! I should say something about it really. A few days ago I was asked by my family what I’d like for Christmas/Birthday (as my birthdays only a few days later they get combined). My wish list is pretty much:

  • TomTom – Borrowing my grandads at the moment, but I need one of my own really ^^.
  • Caverna: The Cave Farmers. Looks like a fantastic version of Agricola with some of the aspects that put me off being tidied (Feeding family for example).
  • Legacy: Gears of Time. I have the back to the future card game (kind of like chrononauts) but it doesn’t quite scratch my temporal board gaming itch, so this looks like a good option.
  • Belfort. I’ve developed a soft spot for TMG after getting KoAaS and this looks like it could be of interest to me,
  • Eldritch Horror. Arkham Horror seems a bit OTT to me, this streamlined new version looks great though.
  • Socks. I mean c’mon, what’s Christmas without socks as presents. =)

Can’t wait for Christmas day to try out some or all of those!