At Airecon…
Games started with Compile: Main 2, first time I’ve had a chance to play with this set. Diversity has a very interesting tweak that lets it be flipped without triggering a formal compile action… I suspect the best way to play this is knowing all the cards, and against someone else who also knows all the cards.
On to Project L, always good fun.
And Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition with Disparation: Chrono-Ranger, Omnitron-X and KNYFE against Miss Information in Silver Gulch. Tricky, but we made it.
Skull Queen next, still an interesting tweak on trick taking. I still don’t play trick-taking games well but this is one of the ones that has helped me to understand them better.
Then Imperium: Horizons, Polynesians vs Martians. This was probably a bit over-complicated for us at this time of night, and we didn’t finish, but we were each convinced we were losing.
By request, I had brought along Firefly: The Game. I took a “Goody Two Shoes” crew, none Wanted, mostly Moral, and just beat out Wright’s “Human Resources” crew to be King of All Londinium. This took about five hours in the end, as Firefly tends to
Tavarua. There are sone fiddly timing concerns here and I think it’s worth having a timekeeper to make sure everyone’s in the same phase of the game at the same time, especially at six players as we were.
On to Sea Salt & Paper while other people got lunch.
In the morning, out to the dealers’ room in case of anything interesting. I’m still not sure why the big game vendors bother, really, but some of the smaller ones were interesting.
No photos for the new Flip 7: With a Vengeance. I feel edgy about this: if I didn’t already have Flip 7, I’d buy it. I’m not at all sure there’s any virtue in having both; any time I’d play one the other would be an acceptable substitute. But then again it was fun… and one player lost by half a point, having a score divider played against him and ending up with 199½… and half rounds down.
On to Spokes, in which you’re trying to lay trails of the same coloured rods to make a route round the racetrack. But the next player may be able to use the trail you’ve just laid… which is how I ended up taking the final lap in one move, Automobiles style. Good fun!
More racing, of a sort, with Steampunk Rally Fusion: Atomic Edition. I ended up with a remarkable lack of movement generators for much of the game, except when I suddenly had several at once and could zoom ahead.
Faraway but I don’t think any of us had trouble with it. I asked the friend who was out in the trade hall to pick up a copy for me, even before the game had ended.
Next was Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition, Nightmist, Ra, and Darkstryfe/Painstake. versus Necrosis in Silver Gulch. This was a long and tough one: Ra went down quickly and the rest of us were struggling. Nightmist fell taking out a whole bunch of Ongoing effects, and Cosmic kept Darkstryfe/Painstake pumped up while they dealt damage. Hard work and I was expecting us to lose, but we just barely made it in the end.
On to Nokosu Dice with four, in which I carefully warned people about the Confusing Rule and this mostly worked.
Out by the loos, there was a wooden dexterity game: your job is to move the ring round the maze, by pulling the strings, without letting the ball fall through any of the holes.
Next game was Decrypto, in which I had my usual problem of being either too obscure or too simple, and not knowing which. But in the end we outlasted the other team.
Getting late, but there was still time for Letter Jam, and three of us got bonus letters.
Last game of the evening was Project L.
Several of the people I’d been playing with had to leave for the Sunday, but I got in a game of Xenon Profiteer.
Then, Kluster, particularly fiddly on the slippery neoprene mat.
Five-player Tenby, in which I almost had a great idea: get one long street that qualifies for everything. Sadly, I’d failed to realise that I needed to complete the street to do this, so I missed out on quite a lot of points. Never mind!
Finally for the show, Rossio, a mostly abstract tile-laying game with a pleasing interaction of mechanics. I did badly, as I almost always do in this style of game, but still had a great time.
Very thematic victory. (Still Spirit Island)
