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Tuesday-night boardgaming again, at last! ( Blow-by-blow )

Brian cancelled on us, but Roman was not to be denied!  Two-hander evening was declared, and on the basis on "most time served on shelf without any plays", A&A:Pacific was nominated.

( War stories )

Saturday afternoon boardgaming!  Origins!

( Or to slightly expand on that )

Tuesday night boardgaming:  Shogun.

( Medieval mayhem, with pics )

Quick roundup of June's boardgaming over at Sam'n'Myles' place, as already LJ'd by the latter: Trias, Union Pacific, RftG and RTfA, TransAmerica, Settlers, RftG and RTfA and Ticket to Ride: Europe.

I also recently noticed I'd entirely omitted to post about our play of Le Havre.  However, Roman had the presence of mind to write up the session, here, complete with a pic.  Not much I can add with any reliability of memory at all, but I'll add an out-of-order post as a placeholder, along with my own session photos.

Brian and Roman around for boardgames: AoS had been flagged in advance, so I'd given the rules a goodly read-through in advance, punched some bits, and was generally ready to roll.

( Murky details and pics )

Three-handed play of one of my "new" games, after quite a gap since this lot'd played anything.

( Synopsis, thoughts, pic )

Out of order placeholder for a session of Le Havre I forgot about.

Roman's blog about it.



And the rest of the photo set.

I'll keep this brief, since I'm way behind, and since MC's gotten his oar -- and in one case, pictures! -- in first. At any rate, several boardgaming sessions with the over-yonder crowd:

TransEuropa, Roll Through The Ages Clearly the former is refined and sophisticated game of skill, and the latter is far too luck dependent. :)
Cleopatra Lots of nice bits. Lots of arbitrary-seeming game mechanics. Some amusement from the
Dominion and TransAmerica One light filler, and one gaming classic.
On The Underground Some clever touches in this to distinguish it from Yet Another Light Connectionist Train Game, by way of "Metro-ish" chrome. Annoying that the game designer doesn't seem to be able to quite make his mind up about how to balance the advantage of being the starting player. (Though some kudos for not going the sadly familiar route of "not bothering his arse even trying".)

Bit behind in my boardgame updates!  More later, hopefully.

Last night Brian, Roman and I played ( Antike. )

"Farm immediately."

One down from my recent games consignment, eight to go: ( Agricola )

The eight boardgames previously mentioned turned up early this morning.  Very early by my standards -- they phoned before 8am to see if there'd be anyone in, then actually came 'round at about 8:30.  Even brought it up the stairs, which is a first -- chap needed a signature, which I bleerily, electronically scrawled, before opening just the invoice/receipt attached to the outside of the box, before decisively going back to bed.  Apparently Parcelforce deliveries don't end up with An Post after all, but with some crowd called GLS, who may make more of an effort to actually deliver it.  (Custom and practice for the postie seems to be "we wafted it past your building, now come to the arse end of Togher and fetch it yersel', sunshine".)  Got a freebie thrown in:  Ghost for Sale.

If I end up playing solitaire Agricola extentensively, don't be surprised if I end up blinder and crazier than usual.

Next, some probably largely lighter and language-indy fare, either from amazon.de or from Magier-spiele -- who it turns out do actually deliver to outside of Germany, contrary to the protestations of their shopping cart system.

Think I'm going to have to order the new BfL album.  Hope it's as good as the last one...  Not knowingly under-wackying the video, anyhoo.

... though not necessarily very far:  went over to frosthearted  and my_name_is_fiki 's place.  After the traditional gabbing and digressing, we played a three-hander of Funkenschlag.  (I'm on something of a Power Grid kick at the moment, I freely confess it.)  We played the western three regions of the US map (same as last game with Brian and Roman -- no photos this time, I'm afraid).  This was shaping up to be another epic shortage of coal, but ended up relatively resource-balanced with a mid-game outbreak of ecos an diversification.  Garbage had gotten pretty cheap by the end:  couple of the medium-sized ones had been removed, and the 3-powers-7 plant was only bought right at the end.  Final scores:  me 18, fiki 17, frosty 15.  We'll have to see if I've won any more converts to this one...

We were then joined by Steve, and played a game of No Thanks while Fiki made a BK run.  Quick and chaotic stuff, and finishing amazingly close: Steve 60, FH 63, me 64.  (Low score wins.)

After which (and the consumption of burgers), we played Race for the Galaxy.  That finished Old Earth (Fiki) 44, Episolon Eridani (FH) 37, Earth's Lost Colony (Steve) 26, Alpha Centauri (me) 26.  I think that was both the most VP chip points I've made in RftG (12) and the closest I've come to making a fist of a "brown engine".  Unfortunately for me, Fiki had a whole pile more (also my first game where it ended on VPs, not cards), FH had a much better rare earth setup (completely stymying my "most brown produced" card, for one thing).  Cards I had in play were also shrapnel-like in VP value, and I had no 6-pointer.  (Only half-decent one I'd seen all game was SETI -- always a good fallback -- but I ended up burning it).

Finished off with a couple of games of Heckmeck.  This is a game of outrageous levels of bowbing and schadenfreud, but (unlike TTR:tCG, say!) works for me by being that bit sillier, shorter, lighter, and expectations-conformant than some.  Much pointing at, laughing, goading, etc.  Scores:  Fiki 12, FH 11, me 5, Steve 0;  Steve 9, FH 4, me 4, Fiki 1.  The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.

In unrelated news, Tesco's "healthier" hot cross buns are rather tasty.  (They had a huge stack of them heavily reduced last night.  Aren't they about a week too early?)

Not to be outdone by four-boardgames-ordering Myles (and more to the point, not to miss the end of the Heron Games' March sale, I hope), I've just ordered:

Age of Steam; Agricola; Antike; Die Macher; Le Havre; On the Underground; Shogun; Wealth of Nations.

Quite a range of "weights", in both senses.  Couple of those are hovering either side of the 2kg mark.  Hoof.  The majority of them are probably (and in some cases firmly) in the "too long to ever get played" for at least one of my usual groups, though at least for Age of Steam we have a go already under our belts.  Once I work out the best place to order from in Germany in these post-Adam Spielt (RIP) times, I have some notions for some language-independent purchases, some of which are rather lighter.  And some of which are Funkenschlag expansions, bwah-ha-hah.

Also, full of (red) lentil soup.  A former flatmate slagged me off as never making any other type of soup... but it never seems to come out the same twice.  That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.  Though I have an interesting-looking recipe for _brown_ lentil soup.  (Is there nothing to be said for another leguminous broth?  I thought the last one went down very well.)

OK, we were quite a bit early, since we started off on Saturday morning-- or we would have done, if Roman hadn't had a puncture en route, and I'd been awake...  Anyhoo, after a brief bout of propagandising Brian with one round of Fjords, we started a three-player game of Funkenschlag, on the US map (westernmost three regions).  Not the smoothest possible start:  I was still only half-awake, and the other two were a bit rustier than I'd anticipated.

( Blow-by-blow and pic )

I was a little surprised to learn that neither Roman nor Brian had played Union Pacific -- which was lying in a louche pile around my living room when they came over. So after my pro forma protestations about Goa, we wheeled that out, and I struggled to remember how to play. (I'd totally forgotten the bit about the share cards being a random draw, which is rather key. Been a while.)

( Grubby details and pics )

And then San Juan with the "Thursday crowd" -- now also appearing on Sundays and Wednesdays!

http://mylescorcoran.livejournal.com/193796.html

A close game, and a respectable second place for me (respectable on the basis of "wah, I didn't draw the Guild Hall, or the Library" -- until I got two of the latter, at once right at the end, just to add insult to injury).

Another game I've had for ages and never played:  Maharaja.  Not the "Indian Britannia" one -- "world's first 3 1/2 player game", according to Andy Daglish -- though I've had that one for exactly as long, and never played it, either.  No, the Kiesling and Kramer (or is that Kramer and Kiesling?) one, building palaces in India. Not to be confused with "Tadsch" Mahal. On the face of it it's yet another "area majority with too few actions per turn" job, but there are some interesting wrinkles, like the character "roles", which one of the actions is to change around, and in particular that the area majority bit is only for "cash flow" purposes, not actually for scoring, which is on the basis of "get out them (highly expensive) palaces".

Which last point I think I didn't pay enough attention to: final scores were Roman, "out" with all seven palaces played, me with five, Brian with three.  Intruiging, nice looking, would play again.  It has a horribly unclear rulebook, though, which we seemed to expend a lot of time trying to parse and disambiguate.

Chrononauts was quite fun, in a confusing/random/chaotic/relatively quick/pub fare sort of way.  I think we played twice down the pub on the Friday, in between some other stuff.  (Like the Res Publica, some pints, and enough roast beef to stun a smilodon, and maybe another game I'm forgetting about -- I refer you back to the PIA comment...)

Pandemic was mechanically and thematically interesting, but I think I'm likely to resist any urge to rush out and buy because it does ultimately seem to be exactly multi-player solitaire.  IICS there's no competitive element at all, no communication restriction, no anything at all to make one feel like one is essentially anything other than a hand-of-cards holder, and a contributor to the groupthink gestalt.  (I hooked the same group into playing Shadows over Camelot, which they seemed to like, and we were toying with trying BSG, but we wimped out for reasons including time, lack of anyone that'd played before, and lack of anyone that'd even played before.)

Another arse-freezing and foot-soaking March weekend, another K2!  The gaming con that thinks it's a weekend away!  Or is that, the gaming weekend away that thinks it's a con? Much fun was had by all -- or if it wasn't, no-one was admitting it, and indeed was doing a pretty good job of faking us out.

New games played:  Chrononauts, Pandemic.  Vague plans to get in a game of BSG and/or Antike never quite materialised.

'Blog while you're winning' content:

• Res Publica in the pub -- quite narrowly, with hrafen  a real threat as the first (and I think only) person to get a second "settlement":  very much a tight constraint in the 5 player game.
• Funkenschlag: never really headed, beating up on some newbies to the game (Mark, Tara, Andrew) who seemed quite taken with the game, all the same.
• Race for the Galaxy: New Sparta with a crushingly unsubtle NGO/lots of aliens win -- 23 points from two 6-cost devs -- which I'd have won without anyway! Not sure how many converts to this one: Seamus declared the NGO card "broken", and Ash realized his main difficulty with the game was not being able to read the cards. (I'm not much a fan of their design myself, much less the iconography.)
• San Juan: two-player with Tom before designing to leave the cottage early(ish) on Sunday morning.  Slightly exaggerated scale of victory by forgetting the "special case" rule for the Library.
• Puerto Rico, twice.  Just for a change somewhat shipping-heavy both times; very close finish the second time, after getting my coffee squished by the player to my right, and making the worst use of the wharf ever, recovered only by getting two 10-pointers in the finish.

Will update or repost with rest of the (tragically non-won) games later, if I can get my memory in order.  (Maybe I should weaken and get a Portable Information Appliance of some kind to cope with my wonky brain cells.)