by Jeff
This week has been a very Christmassy week in the Lego Pirate:arrrh: household, we’ve started decorating the house of Christmas, we’ve had the school Xmas Fayre and my BGG Secret Santa present turned up!!!:DThis was my first year of taking part on the BGG Secret Santa, which I’ve really enjoyed (probably more than any grown man should to be honest), picking out gifts and taunting my Santee was loads of fun, but when I came home from work to find an Amazon delivery for Lego Pirate, I was as happy as a 10 year old on Christmas Eve! As Noah and Samuel were already in bed and Santa had given me a heads up that he had added something for them I waited one whole evening before opening up the box with them. We were very excited to receive both Eldritch Horror and Codenames Pictures.:surprise: Codenames Pictures has already had several plays over the weekend.:D
Wednesday 30th November
However, the gaming sessions started earlier in the week with my usual Wednesday night trip to my FLGS www.missinggeek.com. Unfortunately a continuation of the recent Pandemic Legacy campaign was not on the cards :(.
However, I was offered a seat on a game of Tragedy Looper. Anime, story telling, deduction… Not my normal fare, but I decided to give it a go anyway. The basic premise of the game is that you play a group of time travellers who can loop back in time to a set point at which a set of tragic events unfold. It is your job to work out the roles of the characters involved and prevent the tragic events from happening. This is done by trying to understand and second guess the actions of the Mastermind. After this explanation, this game was also feeling a little bit like an RPG to me as well as I was sceptical about what I’d got myself into, especially as I saw a game of Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu starting up. However, much to my surprise quite liked Tragedy Looper, it reminded me a little of one of those logic puzzles where you must work who Harry’s brother is from a series if seeming unrelated clues. I liked having to work out the clues and stop the ‘Mastermind’ we only played it on one level above the intro game and it was quite challenging. I’m not sure my teammates enjoyed it as much as me though, they seemed a little lost, although we did just manage a win by the 'bad ending' rules. i.e. we worked out the roles of the characters but didn't stop the tragedy.
Tragedy Looper took up much of the evening so there was only time for a couple of quick games before the traditional evening ending Ultimate Werewolf session. So first up we had a game of Beyond Baker Street and I continued my recent mission to spread the word about what I consider to be an excellent cooperative game. I yet again found myself with 3 people who have not played the game before (John, Claire and CJ), so we did the level 2 case and just managed to scrape in with a win.
Next up CJ wanted to play Boss Monster II, a card game loosely based around Mario style video games where you take the role of the level Boss building your dungeon to kill off the hero’s. It is a nice idea and the card graphics and thematic touches are nice. But I found the game play a little tedious :snore: and heavily luck driven, don’t think I’ll be rushing to play this one again.
As usual the evening ended with a session of Ultimate Werewolf, albeit slight smaller than last week due to there only being 10 of us. It was an odd game as both werewolves were killed off in the first day by the vampire and lynching. This just turned the game into a session of hunt the vampire, which took longer than it should have done!
This is likely to be my last visit to the Missing Geek before the new year due to various work commitments and the Christmas break. Hopefully I’ll find some other gaming sessions to fill the void during the gap.
Saturday 3rd December
Saturday morning saw the opening of my BGG secret Santa presents, which took the boys all of about 30 seconds! As I’ve already mentioned Codenames Pictures was one of the gifts and it did not take us long before we got it to the table for a game with Samuel and I teaming up against Noah and my wife, Natalie. The game played really well, better than I expected and we didn’t even have to simplify the rules for our 4 and 6-year-old boys (although we had to keep the clues to mainly 1-2 picture clues). Natalie and Noah narrowly won the game but we all enjoyed it and seeing Noah’s face light up when he worked out a clue was fantastic!! :D Think we’ll be playing a lot more of this.
This game was just a small appetiser for the evening that was planned. We had moved our usual Friday night gaming session to Saturday night and even better we were starting early! So Simon, Chris and I were all ready to go at 5 O’clock, but no surprise that Jay turned up late as usual, but we still go into an extra 2 hours of gaming.
Jay turning up late was nothing though compared to the bombshell that Simon dropped. As he not been for a few weeks we let him choose the first game and he chose… Risk!:surprise::wow:... yes, you heard me right, Risk! And this was before any of us had even started drinking.
Oh well I thought a bit of Retro gaming can’t be that bad I suppose and it must be at least 20 years since I last played Risk and I do have found memories of it. During the game I was annihilated after pursuing an aggressive strategy of trying to kill of Simon’s forces early on… I would have succeeded as well if it wasn’t for some rather stubborn troops in Scandinavia. :shake: Jay won in the end by controlling 24 territories.
After that trip down memory lane we decided to bring ourselves right up to date and the group were willing to have a go at Codenames Pictures. I was not sure how the game would go down as the group were not normally the party game type and do like their Euro Games (mind you we has just played Risk). Codenames Pictures, went down a storm with the group, we had 3 games in a row and then followed it up with 2 more later. It would be fair to say that the group loved it and I think that Jay and Chris had ordered a copy online before the end of the evening. The games were relatively evenly split with Jay and myself edging it in a best of 5.
Up next was a solid Euro in the form of Kraftwagen. This is a recent favourite of the group although we’ve not managed to get a game of it in for a few weeks. I particularly like the way the turn order and actions are managed, allowing you to do whatever you like if you are willing to allow your opponent’s lots of free turns. We all pursued slightly different strategies and there was lots of lovely undercutting of car pricing on the market, in the end Jay came good just 2 points ahead of Chris. This was looking like Jay’s evening, wins at Risk, Codenames Pictures and now Kraftwagen. Maybe we needed the break out his weakness, Jagermeister and Ginger Beer! :whistle:
After a short break for some curry we followed up Kraftwagen with two games of 7 Wonders with the Leaders expansion. We all adore this game and think it plays best with 4-5 players. We find with anymore it is a little too random. Jay’s run of luck came to a crashing end as he was bottom in both games and Chris managed to win both by just a few points. In both cases not with his normal strategy, he went for Military in the first game (and had the leaders to support it) and Science in eth second (again with a good set of leaders).
We were all now several beers worse for wear and the evening was getting late so we decided to play something a bit lighter. Out came, King of Tokyo! A game I’ve seen a lot about but never played. It is a very simple push your luck style game, which I managed to lose hopelessly at, Simon’s dice rolling was on form and he romped home to an easy win, managing to spend 3 whole rounds in Tokyo!
Before we called it a night we managed to get in one quick game of Beyond Baker Street, I tried to convince the group to try one of the harder cases but as it was Simon’s first game we went for level 2 again. We pulled some great roles out and as such managed to bring in an easy win with Sherlock around 6 spaces from working out the case.
Those of you keeping score will have noticed that I did not manage to win any non-team games this evening :cry:... a fact that has not gone unnoticed by my fellow gamers, much to their amusement :blush:
That pretty much ended a rather fulfilling week of gaming, I did however manage to sneak in a quick game of Codenames Pictures with the boys on Sunday morning (Samuel was keen to play) before heading out to the School Christmas fayre. I think this is going to become a firm family favourite. Maybe I can use it to convert some relatives to gaming over the Christmas break :D