I took a leaf out of Chaz Marler's tips to "Building A Board Gaming Group" by asking a few members who were confirmed to be coming, the type of game they would like to play at our next meet up. I think it worked out pretty well as a way to generate interest in the overall group as well as give members a chance to not feel shy about what they would like to play which potentially brings in new games into our rotation, something that was also evident in our meet up today.
Due to the bigger number of Players and games that occurred today, I will be doing regular coverage of our session instead of the new "Play Better" format.
Game(s) Played:
Session – Legendary
Legendary was Sean's choice this round and so our four heroes gathered around the table to take on the mastermind villain Loki, who in our last outing nearly exactly a year ago, handed out two smack downs and got away scot free. At the outset, things looked to be a repeat of Loki's dominance with the villains filling up the cityscape and escaping successfully, taking their hostages with them and causing grievous bodily harm to our heroes.
Mornings start with a healthy breakfast and boardgames with friends!
Things certainly did not look good for our company of heroes
Someone finally took my advice and started to recruit the big green machine and the villains became more manageable and Loki's life points started being chipped away at. Mo who was carrying the heavy firepower started being all Deadpool like, prioritising personal points over the team objective, so typical of him. It certainly took quite a while but Loki's end was in sight and sure enough at five scheme twists, Loki's reign came to an undignified end.
Here we see Gideon laughing at how he had been saddled with such a greedy hero teammate
The big green machine! He carried the day in the end & is OP which is why he only appears in 10% of Avengers screen time
Results Of Game(s)
Heroes 1 - Loki 0
Session – Pandemic
At the other table, a game of Pandemic was Edward's unusual choice and our pseudo WHO looked to be in trouble from the outset in the Asian region. Quick cooperation by the Western & European powers saw a quick cure researched for the Blue virus and a quick clean up of the region but the Asian cities were quickly filling up with the infected and the Middle East situation was also boiling over.
As usual the West is the first to send out a response team
Asia became too hot to handle very quickly, particularly in the island nations
The next researched cure came for the Red virus but with the situation in the Middle East becoming untenable, the team left Edward behind to deal with the fallout heading towards the Middle East to contain the region. It was too late however as the cure could not reach Osaka in time to prevent the next outbreak and so the world as we know it in Pandemic, succumbs to the Red virus, which our Players postulated to be the Bird Flu or SARS.
Here lies the man who brought upon the end of the world, laying the cube on Osaka that caused the last outbreak which ended the game
The little kiddos prefer e-entertainment over boardgames. Don’t worry they were converted very quickly
Session – Tokaido
Whilst waiting for our heroes to finally finish off Loki, Jimmy got Tokaido ready (his choice for this session) to take a group of souvenir grabbing tourists on a journey from Edo to Kyoto and Alan and I played a game of Three Little Pigs with Sophie and Lydia. Loki certainly didn't want to go down without a fight and was clever to sow internal squabbles between our heroes.
Surprisingly the group tour didn't sound as if they were having a very relaxing holiday to Kyoto at all, and in fact earned our very first 'shushing' from other patrons at the café. The fight over cheap souvenirs sounded like cheap printer ink sellers on the last day of an IT fair.
And our group of tourists are ready to begin! Let the fighting over souvenirs commence!
Session – Three Little Pigs
Three Little Pigs is a nice little game for children that is full of theme and borrows mechanics from Yahtzee & King of Tokyo. The big bad wolf, whenever he turned up, performed really badly and hardly blew house down. A fun little outing for kiddos who are familiar with the story.
With Loki finally vanquished, we split the group into Lords of Waterdeep (my choice) and King of New York.
Session – Lords of Waterdeep
Lords of Waterdeep had the biggest collection of sharks at a table I had ever seen. What's more intriguing was that many of them had not sat down to play a Euro together with each other before, kind of like the first Worlds Poker Tournament. Moses, who already had a reputation, was the first to suffer from mandatory quests (a type of penalty card that slows down a Player) more so because he had built a clear lead midway through the game. As expected, Alan and Edward pulled out the aces up their sleeves to leap frog Moses with Edward coming second to Alan by just a few points. And then of course Moses reveals his Lord (or is it "Lordess"?) - Larissa Neathal the Builder which gave him 24 points to put him in for the gold.
You can see the aura of intensity surrounding the group, that’s how fun this game is
Here we see Moses with his lead before Edward and Alan decided to unleash their Krakens! (Ed: This sounds wrong)
Come to think of it, Moses needs to thank me because he was only scoring 3 points per building instead of 6 points until I pointed it out right in this picture
Here is the end, where Moses leapfrogs everyone with the points from his Builder Lordess
Your winnaaahhh
Session – King of New York
I was busy taking my group through King of New York, which in hindsight didn't seem like such a good fit as my group seemed more of the peace and love kind of folk. Which was a shame as today was the "one time" I decided to just bring two games and leave out all my fillers. In any case, Sean (playing the Mantis) decided to push his luck and stuck to Manhattan for an entire round but was quickly eliminated by my Captain Fish after he finally pulled out of Manhattan. With the damage Sean wrecked on us plus all the crazy "Ouch!" die rolls around the table, we were all pretty low on health at this point and Albert and I were both eliminated at one go.
This was right after Sean was eliminated, somewhat surprising considering he was crowned King of New York twice in a row last time
Deborah rolled another three "Ouch!" rolls and landed another hit to eliminate her last standing opponent - Kong to be crowned the King of New York! (Although it took Albert and I a little while to explain to her why she had won)
Session – Citadels
The Tokaido gang had moved on to playing Citadels with a whole bunch of Jimmy's friends who I've not met before. I'm usually careful to try to get to know everyone at the meet up but the number was really overwhelming at a rather late hour. Having so many people show up has only happened at our meet ups twice before in our three year history and I guess is something I haven't really learned to deal with apart from having additional Moderators in Gideon & Jimmy. Whilst waiting for Lords of Waterdeep to finish tallying their scores, I introduced my table to a quick game of Three Little Pigs which shared the same mechanics as King of New York as mentioned earlier so was easy to teach.
And here we have convertee #2! Lydia enjoyed throwing the dice into the dice tower (Jeremy Tai©) even when it wasn’t her turn
Admittedly I was hoping to try out Lords of Waterdeep having heard many good things before today's meet up which was doubly confirmed so by the comments from the satisfied sharks after they had completed their game today. That pleasure will have to come second to the pleasure of hosting meet ups like this and seeing new and seasoned Players alike coming away satisfied from having enjoyed playing a boardgame just like we used to when we played Monopoly with house rules, Cluedo and even Game of Life.
So until next time, keep calm and play better!
No comments:
Post a Comment