Yesterday I complained that Cat & Fish with 2 players is too quiet... well... now I can say that with 4 players it's one of the tightest gameplays I've experienced. Monsters, oil leaks and typhoons were roaming all over the game board and there was shortage of vacant action spots almost always. During mid-game I had a slight lead, so others ganged up on me and bashed pretty thoroughly... as a result of it winner (by large margin) was the one who hold the second place at that moment.

Kingdom Builder + Nomads, 3 plays in a row with 5 players each. Board gets crowded... pretty-pretty crowded. As a result of it the scores are quite low, but also (at least in our case) the spread was always pretty narrow, like 52-47-47-45-43. This also means that you don't have to get the maximum points from all three scoring conditions, in most cases it's enough to have like one major and two minors/mediums. Anyway, managed even to win one 5p game - as I'm not good with this (even after 60 plays I can admit it) it's an memorable event. I'm also glad that more and more people are beginning to see the real challenges of this game - at the beginning it got mainly "Meh? What a random..." attittude.

In other news: Incan Gold and No Thanks.

Yesterday we had a feeling that might try something completely new. One heavy modifier for this feeling was that I had just finished reading the rules for Cat & Fish - the game my wife bought from Spiel last year because "it had kittens on box cover" and it was on sale. Anyway, the first look at it was that it seems to be a childrens game... and it was left on shelf for over half a year. But after reading the rules I can assure, it's quite a good strategy game. Game lasts 5 years (consisting of 4 seasons each) and the winner is the one with most money at the end. You get money from fishing and then selling the fish - but price depends of the season, so it may be quite common to discover that for getting the best price you have to keep your fish for several seasons. There is also simple technology tree built into the game - by upgrading you can move faster/farther, get better price, have more actions etc etc. At the beginning you have only two action markers, so you can't do everything you'd like, you're also missing money and game end is also too near... so it's similar to the economy games of Martin Wallace :) Anyaway I'm quite eager to play it again, with 4 players, as with 2 it was too quiet, there were free action spaces almost always available.

Another first impression we got yesterday was House of Spirits from Lock'N'Load Publishing. I knew this publisher mainly by their wargames so it was quite interesting to see how they manage to design something else. Rules were quite easy to understand and we got the game flowing soon. Soon after I discovered that marking players' and monsters' HP with pen/pencil is quite painful... you write the name, mark the HP, then cross it when somebody kills it. Rinse and repeat. The gameplay itself left also quite meh-feeling: turn card, roll the dice, killed? no? roll dice again, room empty? yes? new room, roll the dice... and so on. I admit I'm not a good adventure player but this time I even had no desire to read the flavour text on cards. The idea of mechanics was quite good - investigation-themed CDG - but the result felt quite clumsy. I'm not sure if I'd give it another go... anybody up for mildly used copy? :)

Just received information from the production factory that I'll receive the game samples no later than on 11th of June. It's what... two weeks, max? Yay!

Regular Tuesday gaming night at store. After all the "usual" games - No Thanks, Incan Gold, Kingdom Builder - tried also Opera. I had played it only once, couple of years ago and with two players - it was fun then and we decided to try it now with full board, 4 players. Beginning was quite tense - bidding for budget, deciding what roles to choose - but at some point the game mechanics fell apart. It happened soon after 3 players had built Paris and Maestro was visiting this city - after that 3 players of 4 received 20+ money during Income phase and there was no tension whatsoever on this scale anymore. You just bid to the level 10 at the beginning of the round and after that there were only some tactical decisions about who gets the first place for building Milan or sth. Building + opera purchasing cost less money than we received during Income phase, so bank was soon out of money and we started to take income in credits. After the game I even re-read the rules to check if we had missed some vital rules about money management, but no, everything seemed to be ok. Very strange. Money meant mothing at the end but nevertheless the person who got least of it, was left last... and the overall score spread was quite large. Lowered my BGG rating for this one 7->6.

Last week I had pretty tight schedule as in addition to all the other pretty responsibilities I was Main Organizer for second stage of car-orienteering championship - and this took all the available time. By Saturday night it was over and therefore, when we were invited to the birthday party on Sunday, several games were taken along.

Cable Car is an excellent gateway game with easy-to-understand rules, high-quality components and practically no downtime. I was explaining the rules, so, naturally, I was the one who was getting mainly "Oh, you got only 3 points? Whoops..." moves - but, hey, it was fun nevertheless.

With Kingdom Builder there were also more interested participants than vacancies so I just explained the rules and watched the game flowing. It was quite ineteresting to notice, how, from turn to turn, players discovered new options and possibilities and sometimes it took quite a time to make the good tactical/strategical decisions. This crowd is all good players and quick learners - their learning curve has been: first introduction to boardgaming was Roborally, after that we continued with 1856 - and I'm not kidding.

Playing was finished by Abandon Ship and Rumble in the House - two fillers that are both simple, fast and fun - as fillers are meant to be. It's not the winning that matters with those, but the journey itself.

Kingdom Builder with expansion. Played it with 5 players first time... and the board was pretty crowded. Quite refreshing actually, with Ambassadors victory card in play there were several interesting choices available - should I aim for some victory cards at the end or just take now 3 points. Very good expansion, I like it. More choices, more opportunities, a bit more downtime... but actually, does 'downtime' per se exist with this game after all?

Giants. Again one of my favourites. This time, though, lost it by la-a-a-a-rge margin (5p play), usually I play better than this. But the mechanics is interesting and nobody knows the exact score before the end... and of course you can always get points when somebody exploits your worker. Excellent.

Hooray to all the 5 feedreaders of this blog!

Friend of mine celebrated his birthday this weekend and - boardgamer as he is - several games were played. First Ants. In BGG there are several threads about playing it without player elimination... I dunno... it kinda breaks the game then for me. It's fast, there's almost no strategy/thinking involved (if you don't attack, sooner or later you have to defend - but there's component limit so you can't build large defences) and it's quite fun in some brutal way. I'd call it a light-ish wargame for up to 6 people.

Rex: Final Days of an Empire. I knew only two things about this game: (a) it's a remake of some famous boardgame "Dune" and (b) it's based now in Twilight Imperium universe; thus it must be very-very good. I remained cautious because of such hype and started the game with pretty low expectations... but behold - it was even more boring than I even thought it might be. There are 5 strongholds on board, whoever controls 3 of them, is winner. If there are alliances made, more strongholds need to be controlled. And that's it, plus 3 simple race-related special victory conditions with one as "If nobody wins, you win". Strategy? Naaah. Negotiations and breaking the alliances? Didn't see them. And it's not a sore loser's speech - I (my alliance actually) won the gorram game. On Turn 1 built all my troops to my starting base... fast-forward many hours... and at the end of last turn my alliance won, as I had the "nobody wins, you win" condition with my race. At meantime there was nothing to do for me than to defend the stronghold with all my troops and wait for the game to end. I'm quite sure that playing 1856 as dedicated banker is also more interesting than this. (Remark: there are also some optional rules available with Rex that add more variability in victory conditions but those were not used this time)

The Adventurers. We started this game appr. 1AM and the person reading the rules left out some important bits in game play... so as it appeared at the end it was "houseruled" a lot. Everybody reached the end safely, nobody was hit by boulder. If I hadn't played it once before, would've left quite a bland impression.

Elder Sign. From all the Arkham-related games this one I like most. Reason is simple: it takes the best parts of AH - monsters and dice-rolling - and leaves all the rest. No more boring downtime, this is fast and fun and no-AP-prone dice-rolling ancient-beating game. Really good experience in short timeframe.

God's Playground. I suppose it's one of the most complex games Martin Wallace has made, but it's also one of the few titles available, designed specifically for 3 players. No more, no less. Although I'm quite a fan of Wallace's games, I hadn't heard about it until yesterday... but oh boy, what a ride it was! Add together classical eurogame, wargame and co-op elements, shake well, serve with olives. 3 hardcore 18xx/wargame players had to agree yesterday who will defend Poland when each of the regions will give victory points to some players more than others... but if nobody defends practically everybody loses. Anyway, at the end my strategy of faith and belief was victorious as I was building Jesuit schools all over the lands and left the fighting to other players - and securing my estates in region where others had significant points to be had as well. Definitely would like to try this game again, despite of bad stuff that happened from the beginning from Turn 1 already. But as Wallace says in rules about this game - "stuff happens to you and you just have to live with it. If you feel like everything is going wrong and that you a fighting a losing battle then you are experiencing what Poland had to go through."

Another game I played was Lübeck - I suppose it's unknown to most players as we're the only one in region selling that. It has quite decent gameplay hidden under ugly design and clumsy components... but it plays fast and has simple rules.

First couple of plays of Kingdom Builder: Nomads. Quite interesting new strategies are made available. Also, one play when we had new objective card in play, forgot completely that you must score those points immediately, not at the end.

Oh, and the box says "Expansion 1" :)

At Monday there was large boardgaming party at store - from 18:00 - 06:00 with auctions and prizes and surprises. Had to run several things, so didn't get a lot chance to play - just Wiz-War (both my treasures were stolen, I succeeded stealing only one), Vasco da Gama (what a lovely game but everybody else hates) and Valdora (another lovely game I tend to loose every time).