Mini Wellycon was this weekend, but I only made it along on Sunday. I played:
The King Is Dead
3 players. I ended up with the win due to all of the tie-breakers… Wales grabbed the final region to tie with Scotland for controlled regions, and thus had priority over Scotland due to having acted most recently. I would have won outright if Scotland had been the victor, but I had also just managed to tie the front-runner for Welsh influence on my final action, which meant that my Scottish advantage was the decider regardless. (This was slightly accidental, mind – I thought I was losing on Welsh influence, and simply hadn’t noticed that I’d drawn level on that front with my last action!)
Neom
2 players. We were both new to this (I grabbed it from the library shelves on account of some mentions here in recent times). It was a close result – I scored 94 to my opponent’s 100. It felt like a significantly more complicated Suburbia, on account of the sheer number of unique tiles. The manual has about 4 pages dedicated to explaining every single tile in the game in a dense colour-coded list. It’s… quite a lot to take in. We accidentally played the first 2 (of 3) generations drafting tiles per the 3+ player rules, but decided that had been fine after playing the final generation properly. I would happily play this again, and would probably enjoy playing it regularly, but I still feel like the first edition of Suburbia is the game I’d prefer to buy.
Dorf Romantik
4 players. I’d been wanting to try this for quite a while. It’s much as I’d heard it described – a very relaxed co-op tile-layer. There are a bunch of ‘unlockable’ boxes for the campaign system, but we just played the base game. The decisions weren’t ever difficult, but this meant the turns went by very quickly, which was a good thing. I’m not sure I’d play this one solo – I feel like I’d want something crunchier – but now that I have played it at all I’ll be able to describe it to my partner, and if she likes the sound of it then I think I’ll pick it up.
I can’t remember our score… I think it was around 125. The ‘flag’ tiles were a bust for us, as one of them turned out to be amongst the small number of tiles discarded before starting, and the other two didn’t show up until about the final 4-5 tiles. As such we weren’t thinking about them at all, and the best we could do with one of those was a two-tile region. I can see how you’d want to plan for those, and I imagine that some of the ‘secret’ components in the boxes must add in some similar elements.
Forks and Spots
After a dinner break, I sat at a table with Hansa Teutonica, Thebes, Forks, and Spots, and I played two-handers of the latter two while I was waiting for players. When a couple wandered over to check out what was on offer, they decided they were keen to try…
Thebes
4 players. I was super happy to get this played today, as it’s been too long. We had a last-minute addition of a 4th player (who had played before, so I didn’t need to repeat any explanation). I’d checked up front that the first-timers didn’t mind a significant luck element, and they were totally fine with that, and everyone seemed to really enjoy the game, and get a kick out of the time-as-resource and archaeological dig systems. Happily everyone had some pretty good success with the digs at some point. I’d thought I was doing quite well, but I came dead last :).
That was about it for the day, but I wasn’t going to make it to the train station for the next train. I found someone else who had a few minutes to kill, and we had a game of…
Forks
2 players. The other player fully grasped the explanation instantly, which caused me to suspect I was about to be destroyed, but they ended up in negatives while I managed 23 points.
(It occurs to me that Forks has a slight “The King Is Dead” vibe to it, whereby the cards you’re holding on to are weakened by taking too many of them, and will bite you if you don’t refrain from taking them, to ensure that they are also strong in the shared space…)
My opponent had to leave at that point, so I didn’t get a chance to go again, but it took next to no time to knock out a round of this, so I look forward to when I can play a few rounds in a row with more people.
This left me with a bit of time on my own, which I filled with:
Sprawlopolis
1 player. 10 points with Superhighway, Central Perks, and Bloom Boom.
I then got to show the game to an interested passer-by who had heard of the wallet game series but hadn’t seen any in person. They said they travelled a lot, so the wallet concept really appealed to them, so that was a nice way to finish the day.
That was a good day – I got to play a couple of new-to-me games that I’d been wanting to try, and a couple from my own collection that I really enjoy, and all the games went well.
