New game! Nordic Ticket to Ride. And a replay of Ticket to Ride Europe

Crikey it is turning into a game fest couple of months - games ordered, preordered, purchased from afar - apparently the new Space Hulk and Back to the Future card games are out soon too which I'll take a look at (Although Anita has put a bit of an embargo on game purchases for a while). Friday I picked up a copy of Nordic Ticket to Ride, a snow bound version of the popular train game, covering the Scandinavian arena and parts of Russia. It uses some of the rules introduced in Europe (Tunnels and Ferries), but leaves out Stations and some of the rules introduced in the Marklin Edition. Very nice version - up to 3 players only - using white, black and purple trains. The cards are lovely, the European size and the trains/carriages are covered in snow. There is even one huge 27-point link between Finland and Russia! This is one great game - lovely for two players over a glass of wine! Anita beat me by 3 points! 

Then we had a go at Ticket to Ride Europe - Anita had big reservations when we first got this - the rules for tunnels especially seemed overly complex, when added in with Stations and Ferries. Therefore we've not played this one for a while, but with the experience from the Nordic one, we played again and found it very enjoyable. 

Disaster at Dieppe and Hedgerow Hell battlemaps ordered!

The latest Memoir '44 battlemap Disaster at Dieppe and the rare out of print Hedgerow Hell have been ordered (HH from the States, so I have a week or so wait for it...)!

Match Attax!

Now this is a weird one; I hate football. Well hate is a strong word, I love it when my team won the sweepstake in the World Cup and netted me £70, but apart from that I don't get the attraction of seeing a whole load of overpaid guys running about after a ball. Then came MatchAttax. Apparently these have been about for a while, and Maya has been on about them for ages, collecting a few, doing a few swaps at school, but not really knowing why and what for.

Eventually she convinced me to get her the collection tin and storage book for somewhere to put her collection so far and we had a couple of games to find out what it was like. It is sort of like Top Trumps - you select your players and lay them out in a 2 attackers, 4 midfielders and 4 defenders with 1 goalie. Then a player selects a card to attack with by tapping the back of the card and the defending player selects a card they hope will deflect the "shot". The attacker reads out their cards Attack score whilst the defender reads out the Defence score. If the attack is higher, a goal is scored otherwise it is deflected.

This is continued back and forth until all the cards are expended; it's also possible to Sub in up to 3 players and use once per game a Managers defence/attack score to bolster up a "just missed" score.

In all, an enjoyable little game that is perfect for younger and older kids alike.

Here we go, here we go, here we go......