Elder Sign at a great price!

On Thursday I was looking at Elder Sign at Battlequest with Nigel. I had seen it a few times and it interests me. I like these sort of games, investigations in the 1920/30s in a Fringe tv show-esque universe - I played Mansions of Madness once and enjoyed it but didn't want to spend a fortune getting the Arkham Horror games without first experiencing it. Then Nigel reminded me someone was selling a copy of the game in Horsham for £20. An offer was made of £17.50 and it was mine! It's in mint punched condition and looks great. It's also a Fantasy Flight game so it's bound to be cracking. More on it when I get around to play (It's a single player game too!).

A quick game at Battlequest

Today had a quick game at Battlequest - had to get away early - so I just played a quick game of some game with Steve and Andy - a game about scoring the most with castles and tiles. It was ok I suppose, but a bit dull. Not my cup of tea as they say.

First game with new 7 Wonders Catan wonder

Today we played 7 Wonders using the new Catan Wonder I'd got from Andy at BQG. Maya wanted to play it so she used side A as side B has to be used in conjunction with the Leaders addon. She found it ok to use - a little tricky understand how two materials can be swapped for another, but once she got the hang of it she liked it a lot and used the swapping just the right time a few times to get the buildings she wanted.

Hero figures all painted up!

I started painting these a while again with Nigel Heather, but the white undercoat was awful - a horrible white paint by Games Workshop. I tried my best to make do with washed out details and also my eyesight not as good as it was! :) Anyhow I think this is a reasonable effort (better than grey plastic!) but the eyes could have been much better. :(

First play of Merchants & Marauders!

Today I went to Andys Battlequestgames evening and ended up playing Nigel Woods Merchants & Marauders - a massive game of trading, pirates and naval warfare. The premise of the game is to either act as a Merchant, as Julian did in our game, as a Pirate, as Nigel did, or a mixture of the two, like me - although I had to be the most sorrowful pirate on record. The idea is that scattered through out the Caribbean there are various ports to trade (marked by counters) at and also to collect improvements for ships. Also in your home port is your Chest. You can put gold you have won or made into your chest so that it can be counted up later.

Game start

With your starting ship you sail throughout the islands looking to make money and sell goods to the highest bidder. You can also make money completing missions and taking on special events and cards. Pirate ships also roam the seas and wars can break out between nations, so your sailor who may be of one nation may be blocked from entering a port because his home nation is at war with its owner. Home nation warships can also come looking for pirates and woe-betide anyone who goes up against them!

A players ship sheet showing the players sailor top left, any specialists on board,
mission and rumour cards, plus the actual ship bottom left with its
abilities in the centre. Gold is on the right. 

The game progressed smoothly with little interaction between players but with lots going on. Then war broke out between France (my home country) and England, leaving me with several important ports blocked off. This started to change our strategies - Julian was an extremely wealthy trader and I was just making it by. Nigel was scrapping about but making good headway.

Just about to start rocking the boat as it were with Julian!

I decided to pounce (after a LOT of prodding by Nigel lol) on Julians well laden ship with my own ship bristling with guns and weapons of war. It didn't seem fair as he didn't have much protection - he was quickly destroyed but his sailor got away. I got a lot of booty and gold. But this marked me as a Pirate and Man O'Wars would be after me! Nigel too also started a campaign of violence and just as three Man O'Wars showed up, I slipped into a French port, sold all my booty and my old ship, used a card to get rid of the bounty on my head and bought a trading ship! I slipped away whilst Nigels little sloop was suddenly the focus of three enormous Man O'Wars.

Nigels blue sloop is about to be pounded for indiscreet actions whilst I slip away
into the night with my shiny new green merchant ship! 

Unfortunately for Nigel, I got to throw the dice for the AI attacking ships against his sloop....I have a knack for good rolls!

Skulls mean hits - sorry Nigel! You got a few too many of these!

Nigels ship was utterly destroyed by the impact from three warships - crime doesn't pay unless you can pay to get a new ship before the Law comes!

The game ended with Julian getting the maximum points after building up his trading ship again and still scoring it big time trading. This was a very long but great game. It has lots of things to do that you can do or choose not to do which is what I like in a game. The length was a bit of a downer, but it was a great game.

Galactica - just too hard for family level with all rules?

Today we set out as a family to play BSG - as usual there is the long set up time and everyone picked their favourite characters - but quickly the game came to a stop because we found it was just too complex for us to follow properly what we were supposed to be doing. I knew what to do and tried to help the others by helping them in their decisions but I ended up playing a 5 player game by myself as the girls and Anita were making decisions they didn't understand or know why they were doing it, which was fair enough. Maya especially had a hard time with reading the cards.

This got me thinking about editing the rules slightly (or a lot!) to make the game easier to play simply because they are not used to playing games as complex as this. I thought about taking away the Admiral and Quorum cards plus having every Crisis card carry a jump prep icon - as one of the complaints was it was taking forever to initiate just one jump! Maybe also do a game end at distance 4 instead of drawing extra Cylon cards. Possibly also get the players to ignore the text on the cards and just use the colours. This may make it harder to win, but just so that the family get a good flavour of the game without being bogged down with ALL of the complexities and want to gradually introduce specific rules with each play.

I'll bring this up with them and see what they say...fingers crossed!!

Large scale (And long!) battles with Warrior Knights

Tonight Brian kindly hosted again to play Warrior Knights, a large scale game of kingdoms, knights, armies and crushing of enemies. It had all of this in the several hours it took to play except for the crushing of enemies which came quite late in the game.
Six of us played the game, which is bound to make it longer, but also it makes it more fun as there are more people to defeat, work with, crush etc.

The game is set up - everyone is ready to start crushing and conquering!

The basic premise of the game is that it is a fantasy land of many cities ready to be conquer by the players armies and then defended against incursions by other players. Every has a starting Stronghold and 4 Knights plus a leader. Each player starts with a set amount of Troops to divide between these knights, either to defend their Stronghold or have as a set army to invade other independent castles and absorb into your kingdom. The more castles in the kingdom, the more money a player will get at the end of a turn, leading to investment in more things; such as bigger armies, mercenaries and exploration of foreign lands for trade.

The mechanic for the game is that everyone has a selection of cards that allows the Baron to move & attack, gain political strength to try to become head of the parliament, hire mercenaries and gain religious faith. Everyone reveals their cards one by one and carries out that particular task and then the card (which is marked with a colour) is put on a pile of that colour. When the number of cards in one pile reaches 12, a trigger one of four phases - such as collecting taxes, a session of Parliament, hire mercenary/pay existing mercenary stage etc.

Nigel has gained enough Religious clout to become Head of the Church! 

Building of armies in our game took quite some time and it was only Julian who was making a lot of ground until Brian started making a strategic attack upon Nigel Wood. My empire was nestled in the bottom left of the map; gradually taking out more and more independent castles, but I wanted control over the access to a river near my main Stronghold and Nigel Heather was too close for my liking. After spending time and money investing in an army, I struck out at one of his castles and took it over.

I start to make my move against Nigel Heather

The pace of the game was way too slow for me unfortunately as it took so long to grow and army to a good strength and there was a lot of risk in attacking others; especially with six of us, if a sufficient enough sized army was moved to attack one player, the rest of your empire was open to attack from someone else, so most players took little chance of doing this. It turned out to be a very long game, especially because of the number of players, each trying to decide what to do and how to do it. Perhaps it would be better played with 2 or 3 players. Not sure I'd come back to it if it was another 6 player game.

End of game - Brian (green) is making heavy progress against Nigel Wood (yellow).
 I was about to attack either Steve (blue) or Julian (red) when time ran out