1.
It was a
strange night in the club. From entries on the Guild in BGG we knew that Jeremy
and Jerry would not be arriving until 8.00 so 5 of us played “SURVIVE”, which was played on
14/06/2012. Everyone except Paul had played the game before but that did not
stop Paul from winning. The great delight was everyone picking on Tony to
ensure that his meeples were constantly under threat from the monsters. Once
Paul had landed 3 of his meeples he also became a target but the card play and
dice rolling favoured him and he managed to escape most of the time. Mike
thought he had a chance of winning as he approached an island with a boatload
of meeples , only for the other players to move Sea Serpents in the way and
that thwarted hi plans. The final top 3 places were Paul 17; Mike 13; Jon 12.
2.
With the arrival of the two J’s there were now
7 players but Kevin expressed an interest in playing the 2-player game “A FEW ACRES OF SNOW”, so he and Tony
decided to do that, but without bothering to make a report on it. This left the
other 5 players at the mercy of Mike explaining the new game “HAWAII”. There are so many ways to score VP’s in this
game they are too numerous to describe here so I will give a précis of the
game. The central board represents Hawaii, within which there are 10 areas
containing various types of tiles, such as Huts; irrigation;boats; surfers;
hula dancers; fruit; tikas; kahunas and Gods. There are 4 islands off the coast
of Hawaii which can be visited by boat, and these provide certain benefits. Each
player has their own development area (their realm) and they are trying to
construct villages containing these tiles, in a sort of grid system, and each
tile in a village must be different. By building horizontally they can either
construct a long village or they can build vertically and construct a series of
small villages. The way in which they obtain these tiles is unique. Each turn
the players receive ‘income’ in the form of FEET, which are used to move to the various areas; SHELLS, which are used to pay for
purchases of the tiles; FRUIT, which
can be used as a substitute for either of the above. In a turn order, which
changes every turn, players decide how many feet to spend walking to an area
and they then ‘buy’ the tile of their choice using shells or fruit. If they pay
the base price it is placed in their area on side 1, showing the benefits to be
obtained. However if they are prepared to pay double the price they
place it on side 2, which gives increased benefits. Some tiles give immediate
VP, whilst most give VP’s at the end of a round, or at Game End. Each round
there is a target to be achieved for the total of price token gained. At the
end of the round the players compare their totals and VPs are awarded for 1st
and 2nd place, with all other qualifiers receiving the same for 3rd
place. The game is played over 5 rounds and then Game End scoring takes place,
which can be quite substantial. For a village to score it must ‘reach’ the
nearest Tika; if it does not do so then it is removed (another consideration). The
interaction comes when other players buy a tile you were seeking, pushing the
price up for any remaining tile of that type. If no price tokens remain players
cannot stop on that area, which is very frustrating. Furthermore you sometimes
run out of feet so cannot move to where you want so you have to pass for that
round, which changes the player order for the next round. A strange game which
is difficult to explain quickly but once you have a couple of rounds out of the
way it flows nicely. Jerry built a spear hut early on and a God tile that also
rewarded spear price token so every time he bought something for a spear token
he gained 3 VP. This enabled him to build up a lead which the others could not
pull back. The other players built various villages and with their game end
conditions met they scored well, so much so that the 4 players were all covered
by a margin of 7 points. However Jerry still had enough Game End conditions of
his own to pull away for a clear victory. With hindsight we should have taken
spear tokens ourselves to deny Jerry such a lucrative points earner, but that
comes with experience, and I’m hoping that repeated plays will ensue for us to
do just that.
Survive – Paul
Bulpin;
Hawaii – Jerry
Jabelman.
No comments:
Post a Comment