Session Report 18 March 2009

With 5 players this week, I brought Richard Denning's Great Fire prototype back to the table. This is due to be demonstrated at the upcoming UK Games Expo, by myself amongst others.
The first time I played the game, the spread of the fire was to the west as is to be expected given the mix of cards, but in all the more recent games we have tended to see a spread to the North and East. I don't see how this may be some kind of strange group think amongst ourselves, because most of the people I have played the game with have been new to it (3 in this case), but we do seem to find a concentration of trained bands in the West, together with a reluctance to play cards for that direction early on.
Anyway that was the pattern for this game, the Tower of London went up in smoke quite early (taking with it most of its demolition charges) and from there the fire spread North up through the Duke's Palace and turned west at the top of the board taking out Anton's Yard and almost reaching the Artillery Grounds by the end of the game. To the west of Pudding Lane the fire spread slowly engulfing Bread St and the areas to its west, but failing to reach St. Pauls, much to Paul's disappointment as he displayed a great aptitude as a pyromaniac and had been keen to burn the Cathedral from the beginning. In the North West the Guild Hall survived despite my best efforts (although the regions on several sides were ablaze), I had been keen to have it burn having earlier failed in my efforts to preserve the Royal Exchange (losing 6 points).
Steve Perkins succeeded in winning the Hero of London award with 6 fires extinguished, having held it since its first award; he was also the only one to keep all his bonus locations intact (including the Guild Hall) and ended up winning from Steve H, who had lost out due to the conflagration at the Tower. All enjoyed the game and at the end agreed that this was a good fun game with a theme that should have wide appeal, being a widely known historical event. The only slight concern, expressed by Paul, was that there might be too many trained bands available allowing the fire to be too closely controlled in the early stages. The problem is reducing the number may allow the first to run completely out of control. A possibility we thought may be in having fixed starting positions for the trained bands or maybe requiring the players to make one of their placements on the North, East or West edges of the board, allowing more scope for spread before they could be properly brought into play. It does occur to me that the number of trained bands might be better fixed rather than depending on the number of players, as the number of houses on the board is also fixed rather than variable.

Great Fire 90 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Steve Pe	53
2	Steve H	50
3	Dave D	45
4	Paul	42
5	Mike	41

 
Next game on the table was Nottingham. This seemed an unusual play of this game with the conclusion coming by the play of the all the missions available before the Sheriff got more than about a third of the way to Nottingham. Only 2 other sets were played throughout the game. I think one reason for this was, probably, the number of ambushes that were set up deterring people from trying for sets of 3. I had 4 of these in front of me thinking I would be able to collect good cards by ambushing other people, it didn't work out like that and it would probably have been better had I simply taken the '9' cards into my hand when I had the opportunity and made a set of them.

Nottingham 30 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Steve H	60
2	Steve Pe	42
3	Paul	38
4	Dave D	36
5	Mike	25

 
Finally there was time for a quick round of Tsuro, Paul winning by staying alive just long enough for the rest of us to fall off the board.

Tsuro 10 mins.
Posn.	Player
1	Paul
2	Mike
3	Dave D
4	Steve H
5	Steve Pe