Games in a Pub - 26th June 2011

More people and more games

It may not have been the largest group we have yet seen (there were 10 of us including my wife and I) but in so many ways it was an evening that was a milestone. It seemed to me that the things of particular note were:

Match Report 20th June 2011

Lots of people and lots of games

With the weather doing what it so often does during English summers (rain) we had a bumper turnout. Welcoming back one of our youngest members Matt, spared from his toils as a trainee farmer because of the aforementioned weather. Although maybe it was the rumour of double munchies (more on this later) rather than the weather that lured our friends along on Monday night. We were also joined by Ben our newly qualified Yacht Master (well done), Natalie our trainee Barrister, Daniella our travel operator and some older people (Crispin, Malcolm and Gwen) who are either retired or do stuff!

With Ben surprising us by arriving at 7pm rather than his customary 8pm (some have said he operates in his own universe, certainly wherever he comes from there seems to be a time difference!) we were initially thrown into confusion. But with cokes, coffees, red wine and ginger beers to hand we started the evening with

Review - Trans Europa

This review draws heavily on a game we played earlier this week.
2 to 6 players, Ages 8+, 30 Minute Playing time

Trans Europa is a simple little board game,designed by Franz-Benno Delonge and published by Rio Grande Games in 2005, about building communication (train, plain and boat) routes (generally referred to as ‘tracks’) from one side of Europe to the other. TransEuropa is a game I picked up following encountering the better known variant of it TransAmerica at London on Board last year.

Components 
35 City cards + 1 Start Player card

83 Black tracks

6 Sets of coloured player markers (a Start Marker, a Scoring Locomotive and 3 Vexation tracks)

1 Game board

1 Rule Booklet

Game Play
You start the game by drawing 5 cards in 5 different colours (corresponding to cities in 5 different regions on the board). These cards are kept secret from the other players but tell you which cities you need to connect in order to win the game.

The game board shows possible routes between the 35 cities identified on the City cards. At the start of the game you pick a starting city place your coloured marker on it and place one or two tracks depending on the terrain (mountains, rivers and sea generally limit you to placing one track per turn). In future phases you can extend your track with one or two pieces, as before, seeking to link your cities. Eventually, as other players are also building track with the same black wooden pieces, your track will

Review - The Great Dalmuti

This review draws heavily on a game we played earlier this week.

Aged 8+, 5-8 players, 15+ mins playing time

The Great Dalmuti designed by Richard Garfield and originally published in 1995 which was out of print for a while and I was lucky enough to pick up a copy of at Essen last year. The aim of the game depending on your position at the court is to hold onto your position (me as I started as The Great Dalmuti) or advance your position (everybody else), this involves changing seats around the table starting with The Great Dalmuti who can select the most comfortable of those available and has been known to make the Peon's stand or sit on cardboard boxes.

As you may already have spotted this is a silly fun game were winning is not

Review - Crunch

Aged 12+ , 2-4 players, 45min playing time

Crunch was kindly provided by its publisher Terrorbull Games (who also publish War on Terror) courtesy of the artist Tom Morgan-Jones.

Crunch is a satirical card game that takes a pop at the world of banking; published following the 2008 banking crisis the game seems every bit as relevant today as the EU and the IMF try to work out a solution to the Greek debt crisis. As CEO of a global bank you seek to do whatever it takes (including awarding yourself huge bonuses and embezzling bank assets) to ensure a comfortable retirement, and if this bankrupts your bank then never mind there is always the chance of a government bailout just so long as your bonus pile is protected........
The subtitle on the box front “The Game for Utter Bankers” gives clear indication of the spirit that this game should be played with and the humour involved.

Games in a Pub - 12th June 2011

Ancient, medieval and renaissance games

Following more efforts to drum up interest I was not surprised to find that once again the take up was small. So it was great to have both Malcolm and Oliver join us for what turned out to be three historically themed games.

First up was Archaeology:The Card Game a card games themed on ancient Egypt that owed as much to Rummy as it did to the historical theme but was a fun light game that worked well as a starter.

Second was League of Six, a medieval tax collecting game, won by Malcolm although Oliver played a good game considering he was the only one who had never played this before.

Lastly was the Renaissance tower building game Patrician. Quiet a tactile game with lots of wooden pieces it has a relatively short playing time and seemed to fit well to the time we had left.

Interestingly as we finished for the evening we fell into conversation with a group who had come in for a late night drink who expressed interest in the games and enquired when the next games evening was. Who knows maybe we will see some new faces next time?!

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Our Next evening will be 26th June 2011 anytime after 7pm.

Match Report 6th June 2011

An evening of horses and tax collection

League of Six (Age 12+, 3-5 players 60+ minutes playing time)

Just back from three days of Gaming at the UK Games Expo working with Imagination Gaming playing lots of great family games with lots of lovely strangers but it was good to be home with my own group. At Gwen’s suggestion our evening group of (Crispin, Malcolm, Gwen and Natalie) went for League of Six. This is a tax collecting games set in medieval Germany where each player is trying to juggle a number of variables (guards, horses, taxes etc) to rise highest in the favour of King Sigismund.