Batavia Arrives!

Several months ago, the Works, the discount book shop, started selling several Queens games and Rio Grande at rock bottom (£7.99) prices... unfortunately I couldn't find all of the games I was after; but I managed to find three for Nigel Wood - and Nigel Heathers found a copy of Utopia for me - but the main one I was after was Batavia. And luckily someone on 'geek was nice enough to contact me to say they had a spare copy and would sell it to me at cost price plus postage. As the game was out of stock on line forever and trying to find it in a shop was costing a lot in petrol and parking fees, I said yes. It turned up yesterday and I'm just about to open the box to see how good it is!

Some family gaming at last yay!

Finally we managed to get down to some family gaming today - everybody has been very busy with homework and everything, so it was good to sit down on the rug in front of the fire and and get some good games done - but which to play in our limited time together! We opted for 7 Wonders - fantastic as ever with Roshni winning by far with her Statue of Zeus Wonder. I tried to hedge my bets with a military win right at the end of the 3rd Age but to now avail! 

Maya gives 7 Wonders a "Thumbs up" endorsement!

After we packed 7 Wonders away, we went on to play Battlestar Galactica - yay! It was our first 5 player game and Kavitas first play as Roshni had had a quick go before. Maya was very excited about choosing her character Starbuck and wanted to dive in but I needed to overview the rules and game actions before we started - also Galactica has a reasonably long set up time that has to be done in a particular order, so as I did this with Mayas help I ran over the rules quickly mainly for Kavitas benefit. 

Play got under way, although we knew we really only had time for one jump, so we made the most of it. Within a two rounds, Galactica had taken a heavy pounding from the basestar near by and several Vipers were battling it out with Cylon raiders. Crisis after crisis was being dealt with and a Cylon Heavy Raider appeared so we knew we had to hustle to get out of there. Luckily we managed to Auto Jump before any more serious damage was done (we'd taken hits to the main guns and the body work). And that was it, we were 1 jump closer to Kobol! The family like the game once they get into it - Anita says it is very tense once it gets going but the set up did take a little time - perhaps the best course would be to set up the game before calling people to play - as Brian has done in the past! 

Oh, and at the end we revealed our Loyalty cards to find out everyone was human! 

Just about to start play - prior to character selection