by Jeff
The first week of the Easter holidays has been a slow week for gaming, I wasn't able to get to either of my two usual weekly gaming nights, but I did have time to get to our now well established works gaming night. We'd gained a new recruit for this week in the form of Matt who recently joined the company and although he is a D&D player, agreed to come along to try out some Board Games, so we had 9 for the evening.Originally when Chris and I started this evening out we mainly looked to used 'gateway' games to bring some newer gamers into the hobby. We've found since then that there are a few quite vicious gamers in group, Marla, Conner and Nicola among them, so we have been able to spread out into some more involved titles such as Lancaster, Kingsburg and El Grande.
This month we decided to give Scythe a go, Chris and I had suggested that the group did three 3 player games as this would give the best diversity, however whilst Nicola, Chris and I settled down for Scythe the others seemed keen on a 6 player game of King of Tokyo. They finished their first game halfway through our game of Scythe at which point I heard Matt saying 'Lets plays this again, it was fun!' think we may have a convert from RPGs to Board Games there :)
Our three player game of Scythe was okay. Chris was Crimea, Nicola Rusviet and I got to Play Polania for the first time. I've played a lot of Scythe over the last few weeks but this was Nicola's first game and only Chris's second so I probably had an unfair advantage. For most of the game we skirted around each other, with all of us getting some early stars up on the board. Chris had concentrated on getting his enlists done early and I had used my submerge ability to get to lots of the encounters (including stealing one from under Chris's nose which was most satisfying :devil:)
Then Chris made the aggressive move of attacking Nicola on two hexes for control of the factory and a bunch of resources, the following turn Nicola retaliated leaving both of them low on combat cards and power. This left them (well mainly Chris) as easy prey for me and on my next turn I ended the game courtesy of winning two combats and completing my objective (control 3 wood hexes), this gave me a very convincing victory of 82 points from Chris on 41 and Nicola on 27. I'm not sure aboTo Forge a Realm ut Scythe with 3 players, I think it can suffer from the player that stays out of combat having an advantage, but then maybe the strategy should be not to go big on the attack until you can use it for the game end/win.
Next up we were joined by Marla for a 4 player game of thing=27162]Kingsburg[/thing] (with elements of the To Forge a Realm Expansion), the other group moved onto playing Discworld: Ankh Morpork as this would be Jess's last work games night (she's leaving us, traitor! ;)) and she loves anything related to Terry Pratchett!
This was not a problem as 4 players, is in my opinion, the perfect number of players for Kingsburg, with 3 there is too much space and with 5 it is a little too chaotic. We'd all played Kingsburg before, but Marla and Nicola only once before, so we started with a quick rules recap. I went for an early Town Hall and Embassy route backed up with lots of military. Nicola made sure she was behind on building to pick up the King's Favour and extra white dice many times during the game which she used to good effect. Chris had the adviser that allowed him to manipulate the +2 tokens to be either +1 or +3 and he also pursued his normal 'market route' giving hims lots of opportunity to fool around with the dice which he was very happy about. :)
Overall it was a very tight game with the lead going backwards and forwards between all of us for most if the game. In the end I manged to sneak a 2 point victory with 47 points, Nicola had 45, Marla 43 and Chris 42. Shortly after this Chris needed to leave as the plumber working on his extension had not sealed off a pipe and there was water coming through the ceiling of his house. :surprise: (I think this is going to be a long couple of months whilst Chris has this extension done). Hannah, Matt and Conner also needed to leave at this point leaving us with 5 players.
We decided on a game of Bohemian Villages, now that I knew the proper rules I was interested to see how this would play with 5 and whether the 'kicking out' mechanism will stretch out the end game too far. The game started out all friendly with everyone except me getting some early manor houses, Chrissy was doing well in glass factories and Nicola was doing a good impression of Wetherspoons by taking up residence in all of the inns. Late game we all started to get low on meeples, except for Jess who'd mainly be playing in the glass factories and flour mills, there was a little bit of 'kicking out' to prevent game end and everyone probably got an extra turn or two before game end.
In the end Marla came out the narrow winner with 53 points from Nicola on 51, Chrissy on 49, I had 45 and Jess 39. Bohemian Villages plays well enough with 5 but I think it went on a little too long for the depth that it has, so I think that 3 or 4 players is probably the optimum number for this game.
That ended another 'Games and Work' evening and whilst we have lost Jess to the lure of a few more pounds in her pocket, we have gained Matt so I think we'll still have a healthy turnout every month.
Thanks for reading...:arrrh: