What game is hitting your table?

[Jolo]

London, Martin Wallace's card game of rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666 was on the table last night.

The basics of the game are very simple
1) Draw a card
2) Do one of these three actions
   a) draw three cards
   b) play cards to your display
   c) run your city
   d) buy a borough
3) Check your cards to see if you have more than 9, if you do, place on the board until you are down to 9.

With most games by Wallace, the devil is in the details though and these are plentiful...

When you draw three cards, you can draw them face down from the deck or face up from the board.

When you play cards to your display, you must discard a card back to the board of the same colour, this means to play a brown card to your city, you must discard a brown card to the board. This means that you are placing potentially good cards for someone else available for them to use.

When you run your city you get the benefits of the cards (which could be money, victory points or poverty point reduction) but you must take a number of poverty points (more on them later) equal to the number of cards in hand plus the number of card piles in your city, minus the number of boroughs you control. If you have a 5 card display and 3 cards in your hand, and own 4 boroughs, you will get 5+3-4 or 4 poverty points (PP).

When you purchase a borough you pay the cost set on the board, and get victory points (between 3 & 5) and cards (between 2 & 5). You then have to discard down to nine.

The game continues this way until the deck is empty then everyone but the person that drew the final card gets one more turn, then you get into the scoring.

You get VP for every three dollars you have, you lose 7 VP for every unpaid loan you have (hey, it's a Wallace game, of course there is loans)! and here is the fun part, the person with the least poverty points discards all of their's and everyone else discards the same amount, you then cross reference your total with a chart and lose that many points. This was my key to victory as one the last four turns I ran my city four times, losing 6 PP the first turn and 4/turn after that, while gaining only 1/turn. This means my real net was losing 14 PP in the final rounds, dropping me to 1. No one else had less than 10...

[Bix Conners]

Last night I played 2 games of Escape: The Curse of the Temple. It is fairly light and not bad at being a novelty game. These were both 2 player games. I think this is a good title to start an evening of gaming. It is light, fun, and a good ice breaker. I imagine things would be more hectic with 4 or 5 players.

After that we played a game of New York. I won this title at BGG.CON and I am very glad I did not buy it. It is an homage to Alhambra. The rules are the same as Alhambra, so this game does not need to be in our collection. Actually, the re-imagined setting and tiles do not work for us. The contrast on the tiles is not as good as Alhambra which creates readability issues. Long story short; we are glad we have Alhambra with the expansions, New York is just a clone that does not really work for us.

[R Newell]

I've played six solo games of Pandemic (so far) this week, playing as two roles each game.  I can never remember that I'm able to remove up to 3 cubes from a location with one action after that strain is cured, so I accidentally make the game harder than it should be.  I think I won once with that self-handicap.  Next game I might try some of the variants from the expansion.

Last weekend I allowed the wife to drag me to the Twilight movie (spoiler: nothing happens and there's no ending), so she owes me.  She's agreed to repay me by playing a game or two with me this weekend.  I'm hoping to break out something from my library that I haven't played before: either Runewars or Mage Knight (only played solo), but if she's not in the mood for anything so dense I'll opt instead for something lighter like Star Wars: Epic Duels , Yomi, or Mr. Jack.

[Bix Conners]

I like Pandemic. I think it is a great co-op game that teaches communication and cooperation. I also think that Flash Point: Fire rescue does a really good job in the co-op arena and integrates the them very well. 

Twilight huh?. Yep, she owes you big time. PS. You may be in jeopardy of having your man-card revoking for watching that. Best thing to do is crack a beer, turn on an NFL game, and play a game that involves death and destruction.

[R Newell]

Twilight huh?. Yep, she owes you big time. PS. You may be in jeopardy of having your man-card revoking for watching that. Best thing to do is crack a beer, turn on an NFL game, and play a game that involves death and destruction.

If that's the price I have to pay to get her to sit in on a game of Runewars, I'll gladly pay it. 

Wait, not gladly.  Grudgingly.  I'll grudgingly pay it.

[Colin Dearborn]

Got my first play in of Mission Red Planet tonight.

Hidden role selection like Citadels, partial hidden victory conditions, some excellent chance to screw with your opponents and everything is wrapped up in a cool steampunk/martian exploration theme. Plays in about an hour and has very high replayability.

Only one play so far, but I can see this being a go to game for a long time.

by the way, Amanda crushed her older brother and I (45-33-28)

[Colin Dearborn]

Been able to get a few more plays in this weekend.

Played a 5 player Mission Red Planet last night, game felt much different than the previous 3 player game. It scales fairly well, although it did get fairly crowded in a couple of the zones on mars. As an added bonus the opportunities to screw over your opponents seemed to increase more than I would have thought. Also of note, the rule book and component quality are both top notch.

Still giving this one a 9 rating so far.

Next up was Fearsome Floors. It is an older Friedmann Friese design. The whole game is getting across the board while avoiding the monster that moves in set patterns. It is a fun light game that goes on just a little longer than it should. There is a fair bit of fun in the box and average component quality for the price, probably will make an appearance around halloween each year.

A solid 6, but again, it does go a little long for a light filler.

Finally have gotten a couple plays in of Voluspa. One 3 player, another 2 player. This is a tile laying game with a Norse Mythology them, fairly straightforward rules with many tiles having special powers when played. When I bought the game at BGGcon I was told to stick to 3 or less, it doesn't scale well to the 5 player game listed on the box. Seems there are less tactical choices the more you play with. I am finding there is a decent amount of game in this little box and am looking forward to a few more plays to see what kinds of strategies will work. The artwork is fairly average but the tiles are the nice and thick.

This one is coming in at 7.5 for me and will get a more play soon with some of the expansion tiles getting used next time. (expansion comes with the base game)

[R Newell]

The wife and I played a game of Mansions of Madness: the Yellow Matter scenario from Forbidden Alchemy with me as the Keeper and her playing as two investigators.  All the negatives that have been thrown against this game are absolutely true, but I still love it for giving me moments like this:

Jenny Barnes finally made her way past the alien vegetation blocking her entrance to the greenhouse.  Inside, she finds Dr. Faust and his fellow cultist, both seeming to suffer from some sort of mutation, performing dark rituals with pieces from a corpse lying beside a blood-stained altar.  Jenny tried to kill the cultist but, in her panic, fumbled her handguns to the floor before she could fire a shot.  The cultist touched her shoulder, thus passing on his strange mutation.  Her skin instantly split and stretched where he touched her.  She looked down in horror as she saw a head breach the split in her shoulder.  Her horror became blinding terror when she realized that the face on this head was her own.  Within a matter of moments, an exact duplicate of Jenny had emerged from her own body -- an exact duplicate apart from an evil yellow glint in her twin's eye.  And the axe.  Where'd she get that axe?

Dr. Faust, in a panicked stupor, watched Jenny's wounds heal as rapidly as they emerged following this most unnatural birth.  Panicked because he was as much a victim as Jenny, having been forced into these abonimable experiments by the Ones in the Yellow Masks.  He now began to realize the full scope of what they were heralding into this world... and what they would do to him if he allowed this woman to thwart their plans.

Dr. Faust screamed out an incantation!  A fireball appeared in his palm and he hurled it towards Jenny.  However, she had somehow regained her wits enough to dive out of its path.  The fireball burst against the wall of the greenhouse behind her, and quickly spread into an inferno.

And now I'm tired of writing out the narrative, but the errant fireball lit the greenhouse on fire, destroying the corpse used for the ritual, killing the mutated cultist and Jenny's evil twin, and injuring Dr. Faust before he was able to exit the room.  Jenny was able to exit the room unharmed, but two turns later she succumbed to her mutation and died.  A victory for the Keeper.  We set up another scenario but didn't end up playing again, so it'll sit on the dining room table until we have time.  Hopefully the cat doesn't decide to play Godzilla on it.


I also played a few more solo games of Mage Knight.  I'm now going through the rulebooks to make myself a personal FAQ of rules that I seem to have a hard time remembering, but I now feel comfortable playing the game with relatively few glances at the rulebook.  And four more solo games of Pandemic, this time with variants from the expansion.

[Jolo]

Last night was a 4 player game of Railways of Europe. Jason started in Paris and continually moved slowly down the coast, connecting Marseille, Madrid and Milan culminating in making a delivery to Lisbon. Brian, who had the Russian rail baron, started in Moscow and eventually connected Berlin and Constantinople together (via Moscow of course). Brent started in Milan and he and I fought for control of Italy, Germany and Austria for most of the game. He did connect to Russia as well. I ended up connecting Paris to Constantinople and Rome, both of which gave me enough points to finish in last place, one point out of third and 4 points out of 2nd (38 points out of first...).

Great game, Jason was left alone, which hurt everyone else.

[Cordawg]

Last night me mark dwain and kent played strike Of the eagle a war game about the polish Russian war set just after ww2 it is a block game so me and mark played the polish and kent and dwain played as the soviets after a big descustion about what side  to play because last game me and mark just got hammerd by dwain and kent  so I got to play the polish in the south where their was not that many troups to command and mark played in the north where he had tons of troups to command  then the soviets placed their blocks  and man did it look like we were going to be slaughtered because dwain had like almost double my troups and then in the north same thing the senario was don't let the soviets get to warsaw if the polish does do that the polish team gets five victory points but total victory points wins after ten turns but the victory points are like twighlight struggle style like a tug of war so the sides were set in the south let's just say I accomplished my goal I jut destroyed dwains army with brilliant manovers and great card play but the north not so good but hey after  10 turns me and mark won the south really was important  overall I would give this game  a 8 but a little too long