Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, the continuing adventures
Pax Pamir, first play. This was from Kickstarter, and of course I bought the metal coins…It’s a tableau builder, set in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. Each player can be loyal to one of three factions: English, Afghan, and Russia. You choose your faction at the start, and this determines which colour armies you’ll place. You can change your loyalty, but you’ll have to lose any cards or tokens from your previous faction. Not a big deal at the start of the game.
This is a tableau builder, with a market of 12 cards always available. The two core actions always available to you are to buy a card, and play a card. If you play a card of a region that another player controls, you’ll have to pay that player. You can only take two actions, but if you have card based abilities on a card that is of the favoured suit (some cards change this), then you get those as free bonus actions.
Each card has special abilities that trigger when the card is played. These are placing armies or roads, taking money from the bank (which will have to be repaid if the card is discarded), placing one of your pieces onto another card, or placing one of your pieces into a region (which can give you control of that region).
Actions you can do from cards are: collect tax (either from another player or money from the market), build armies/roads, purchase a gift (this increases your influence), move armies/spies, betray (discards a card where you have a spy, could be an opponents), and battle (which is either at a location on the board, or between spies on a card).
Doesn’t seem so complicated, but there are a few things you have to keep in mind. Like checking for the ruler of a region when you play a card (and obviously the ruler can change). When you tax, you can take it from another player if they have at least one card for a region that you control. But if the player has orange cards, they protect against being taxed.
We didn’t realise it at first, but its only a certain suit of card that lets you add one of your discs to a region. To rule a region, you have to have at least disc. Armies are easy to add, but they don’t allow you to rule. Our game seemed to be short on the correct cards for this (the purple political cards). There are 100 court cards, and you’ll use 48 in a 3p game. The deck is constructed from court cards, with event cards arranged throughout (not completely randomised, you add them to 6 piles of cards, shuffle each pile, then put the deck together. Events come out in the market, and usually have 2 conditions, one for being purchases, and one for being discarded. Event cards are automatically discarded during cleanup once they reach the first slot of the market.
There are four special events in every game, these are the dominance checks. You count up all the blocks, and if any faction has four or more than the other factions (uncombined), then the dominance check succeeds, and whoever has the most influence for that faction (on cards, gifts, and prizes) gets victory points. No points if your faction wasn’t dominant. if the dominance check fails, then whoever has the most of their discs out gets victory points (but less than you could get from a successful dominance test). The game is over when the fourth dominance event goes off. Also, if (after a dominance check), a player is more than four victory points ahead, they win instantly.
London, first play. Another tableau builder (I do quite like them). A bit simpler than Pax Pamir. And a lot less expensive too, it’s available on Amazon for about $21. You have four actions available to you. Develop your city (by adding a card to your tableau), buy land (buy one of the three borough cards available, which give ongoing abilities), Run your city, or take 3 cards into your hand.
As you develop your cards, you can have as many stacks of cards as you like. When you run your city, each of the top faceup cards are activated, giving points, or money, or other things. So, why not have a huge number of stacks and have all of the cards activate each time? Poverty. Whoever has the least amount of poverty at the end of the game loses all of their tokens, and each other player removes that many. Anything left over will cost you VP. Everytime you run your city, you’ll collect poverty – one for each stack of cards, one for each loan you’ve taken out, and one for each card left in your hand.
Its a cool little puzzle as you try and avoid poverty, and obviously get enough money to buy land.
Skull King, a lot of fun, we should play this more.
Sunday:
Pax Pamir, a new group, so we misplayed a few things again, doh. My fault. In contrast to the first game, there were heaps of political cards, so quite the tussle for regions. Then we all had the same faction, which was a bit weird. I actually started with a different faction, but thought it might be hard to fight against 2 people. So the dominance checks were successful, so it was just down to the influence.
Modern Art, the Reiner Knizia classic. I still prefer Ra, but this is still very good.
