Session Report: Monday, Feb 13th

Got over to DL on monday around 5:45 for a longer game session. Brian was already there so we started with a two player game, Command and Colors, Ancients. We played the first scenario with no terrain, and maybe because of that the game seemed to rely too much on the not very random seeming dice and the players ability to draw useful cards at the right time. I won pretty handily, but can't point to any brilliant tactical strokes by me or blunders by him so thats where most of my negative impression is coming from.

Jon showed up next so we played a quick game of Hunting Party while waiting for the others to show up. My initial impression was that it felt a little like talisman meets magic meets clue. I'll have to try it again sometime. Jon won by killing the shadow in a close game where both Brian and I needed one more skill to successfully hunt him.

Ted, Rob and Simon now joined us for a rousing game of Beowulf. After thinking about it for a few days, I liked this game somewhat. It is mostly an auction style game with some closed fist auctions and some round the table auctions until people drop out with luck entering the game through suits for the auctions and chance opportunities. Brian and Ted won with their no wound bonuses prodding them to victory against those of us who had not gone through our travels unfazed. I definitely would like to try this again and maybe change some of my early strategies.

We broke out Bang for the next game. I ended up as the Sherriff, Ted the Deputy, Jon the Renegade, and the others Outlaws. Jon took out Ted and Brian quickly and was piling up a ton of cards and using them to smite my enemies. After he took Simon out I had to kill him because every time someone died he took all their cards which seemed a little scary to me. I finished Rob off with a flurry of bangs and misses (my special ability was use both as bangs or misses). I have alot of fun with Mafia in big groups and I really like the hidden role mechanic so although things became pretty transparent after the first or second round, it was interesting.

Brian and Ted had started up a game of Jambo while we were finishing up so the remaining 4 of us played Samurai, a tile placement game. I don't really feel like I have a great intuition about these types of games and thought I was getting slaughtered before we revealed to find that we were all bunched very close and that Rob had won by one after tiebreakers. I would like to try this again, perhaps with a smaller group sometime.

Ted and Rob had to leave, and we broke out the last game of the night, Antike. It has about a million bits and theres alot of bookkeeping as the game proceeds. Its basically a no luck expand influence in the ancient world through culture and might game. I went for the expand horizontally while trying to placate all my neighbors(everyone as I was in the middle) strategy and it worked perhaps too well. Everyone was so well placated that the only conflict that happened was in the endgame when Brian sacked one of my temples for the win. Perhaps my expansion should have been followed by a peacekeeping force buildup rather than temple construction to prevent the exact scenario that ended the game. One idea I had for making some of the bookkeeping stuff less tedious is having resource tracks with bits on them that keep track of how much of each resource you are producing. It was annoying with my terrible memory that every time I produced, I had to lift up bits and count how many cities and temples I had of the appropriate type. I think just a minor modification like that would be much appreciated. The game seems like one I would like. Diplomacy seems like it could be very important if there is conflict and I suspect in our next game there will be more conflict than appeared in our first. Definitely one I want to try out again.

We called it a night after that.

Edit to add picture of Antike per Simon's request