1.
13 players showed up tonight. To start on
table 1 Mike led a group of 5 playing “FISCHE FLUPPEN FRIKADELLEN”, a
quirky game from Friedmann Friese about collecting fetishes. Players move
around the board, either by foot or by ferry, to visit Merchants to buy the
goods on offer and/or to sell goods they already have. When this happens the
market price of the sold product drops. Alternatively
the players may visit a Trader, who offers 2 particular goods for 1 of another
particular good. Eventually the
players will have enough goods to visit the
Fetish Dealer and exchange goods for a fetish. When this happens the prices of
the goods used also drop. For each Merchant or Trader visited there is an
associated action depicted on it and these can affect market price, produce
more goods for sale, exchange goods between Merchants or offer the player
another turn. The game is over when a player collects 3 different fetishes but
each level is more difficult to collect than the previous one. In general the
players found the movement and graphics difficult to understand in the early
phases until someone completed the acquisition of a fetish. The feeling was
that the game had been over-complicated for what it was trying to achieve and
it was not rated very highly. Jeremy was the player who grasped the mechanisms
quickly and he bought and traded cleverly to gain the required goods to claim
his fetishes to win the game.
2.
Tony was in charge of table 2, with 3
members playing “RACE FOR THE GALAXY”” the card game in which players build galactic
civilizations by playing cards in front of them that represent worlds or
technical or social developments. These allow the players to collect goods to
be used later on when the appropriate technologies are available to them. In
play that is similar to Puerto Rico players secretly choose a role each round
from a selection of 7 roles and get to perform it. Not surprisingly it was Tony
who developed the best set of cards and chose the right role to maximise it.
3.
Table 3 had 5 players playing the game of “PILLARS OF THE EARTH”, based upon the
Ken Follett novel. A worker placement game in which players are trying to build
the most beautiful cathedral of its day. They use their workers to gain
resources and then turn those into victory points. They can also use them to
produce gold, the currency in the game. Players also receive 3 Master Builders
each turn, which they can use to recruit more workers, buy or sell goods, or
just gain more victory points. They have to strike a balance between using
these for future purchases or racking up the points. The eventual winner was
Paul, by a large margin.
4.
As tables 1 and 2 finished simultaneously
they split into 2 tables of 4 each. Table 1 saw Geoff explaining the game of “OREGON” to Jeremy and Lucy, Mike having
already played it. In this game players use a combination of landscape and
building cards to either place a settler on a particular square on the game
board or to construct a building in a certain location. They score points for
having settlers adjacent to the buildings and move around the scoring track.
Each player has 2 tokens, one of which acts as a Joker for any landscape type
and a ‘have another turn’ token. When they use these they are turned faced down
and cannot be used again until re-activated, which is done when they place a settler
next to certain buildings. Play is swift as they quickly populate the board and
score points and the game has 2 ways of ending, either when a player runs out
of settlers or any 4 of the 7 types of buildings are exhausted. Mike led early
on with Lucy in pursuit. However Jeremy was steadily collecting tokens from the
gold mines for end game scoring. Geoff made a late surge but Lucy cashed in a
large amount of tokens for both Gold and Coal mines and she was just able to
catch Jeremy, who placed a lot of settlers near the game end to score heavily.
Mike was a distant 4th
5.
As
the game finished quickly Table 1 played the dice game “SUSHIZOCK IM GOCKEKWOK”, a popular filler. 2 games were played
with the aggregate score determining victory. Mike and Geoff scored 5 points
each in the first game but were rubbish in the second game and fell away. Lucy
and Paul recovered from their poor start and contested the final scoring, which
Lucy won with 11 points to Paul’s 9.
6.
Table 2 saw 4 players playing another space
game, this time “GALAXY TRUCKER”, in
which players add components such as laser and guns and boosters to their
spaceships and then face attacks from alien forces. The game was played a
couple of weeks ago so is not reviewed again. The eventual winner was Tony.
Games played and Winners were:
Fische Fluppen
Frikadellen – Jeremy Hurualt;
Race for the
Galaxy – Tony Simons;
Pillars of the
Earth – Paul Bulpin;
Oregon – Lucy
Newbury;
Sushizock im
Gockekwok - Lucy Newbury;
Galaxy Trucker
- Tony Simons.
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