Cthulhu: Death May Die , we replayed the episode we had “lost” so badly last week. My fault for that, misread a card. This time we played properly, but progress was slow, Hastur came out and we weren’t close to disrupting the ritual. But we did lose in a different way – running out of time. We were lucky not to lose earlier, had two characters on their last health. Got some good rolls and they survived, but it made no difference in the end. This is one of the hardest episodes apparently (episode five). Still, it was entertaining, and the loss was no real surprise.
Walking in Burano , first play. A fairly quick filler game. You have a market of four (for 3p) cards, consisting of ground level, middle, and rooftop tiles, with three different colours possible. You are trying to finish a house by playing all three types, and choosing a card that gives you points depending on the tiles in that house. So a card might give you three points for every cat in your stack, for example. When you pick cards from the market, you take from one to three cards in a column. If you pick less than three cards, you get a coin for each you didn’t take (so, taking one gives you two coins, taking two is one coin). Placing a card in your tableau costs you one for the first card, and two more for each subsequent card. So, playing two cards costs you three, three cards will cost you five. You can get a bit screwed by the market not having colours that you need. I thought it was quite good, and very easy to play.
Whale Riders , first play. A new game by the master, Reiner Knizia. Its pretty straighforward, I think I can give the rules in a couple of sentences. You move your whale up the coast and back, while collecting tiles and fulfilling contracts. That’s the game – move through each port on the track, then move back to the starting port. On your turn there are five possible actions – move, take a tile (there are four slots for tiles, costing zero, one, two or three), take a coin, discard contract cards, and fulfil any number of contract cards from your hand. You get two actions. Tiles move up (to cheaper slots) and new ones come in at the end of your turn. It’s very, very easy to play. But still, there’s a bit to think about. Everything is about the pearls. There are pearl tiles to take, and completing contracts give you pearl points and money. Once you’re back at the start, you can buy the special pearl cards. Once they are gone, it’s the end of the game. You can’t block anyone, and you can’t deny them tiles (except by accident), because contract cards are secret. It’s a lot of fun, and sadly its the last Knizia title that Grail Games are going to make.
Whale Riders: The Card Game , first play. Much much simpler than the board game version. You have a hand of goods cards. You play one card, then draw. Each goods type has a value, like kelp might be four. Once four kelp cards are played, everyone who played it gets to score them, and any other goods out on the table are discarded. I guess you could call it push your luck? A higher value card is less likely to score. But there’s no way to predict what cards people might have. Usually people (if they could) played a card that had already been played. There’s really not much to the game, I would always choose to play the proper board game.
Regicide , continues to be the most fun you can have with a standard deck of cards. We got up to the first King, which wasn’t a bad effort, it’s about the best we’ve done.
MicroMacro: Crime City continues to entertain. I’ll be genuinely sorry when we finish the cases. The expansion will be a day one buy for me. A worthy SdJ nominee, and I reckon has a good chance to take it (although it’s the only nominee I’ve played).
Project: ELITE , always frantic dice rolling fun. We thought we had chance, but plugged away at the objectives (game mode was Demolition), and all we had to do in the last round was bolt for home. Made it with thirty seconds to spare. My special ability (an extra movement) came in pretty handy there. I had a crazy game, had two dice locked out from damage (most of which was from the aliens pushing me around). Searched and found medkits – twice and used them. It’s pretty hard to commit four dice to an objective when you only have two dice left. We had to pause a couple of times as some wild dice rolls went off the table (Man down!). Its a bit of a fiddly game as aliens are added to the board, but it is damn good fun.
We made a few mistakes in our first two trials and now we’re racing the Hockenheim Ring in our GT-5s (someone loves the green turbo die)–turn-based. Thanks again 