The Games We Play

The Games We Play

A repository of reports on the Wednesday night sessions of the club and anything else related to the club or boardgaming in general, which may be of interest to anyone who may be passing by.

Wednesday 28 April 2010

Session Report – 14 April 2010

10 people this week with a 4 by 4 split.

On one table we had World Without End again, although this time it was Dave F's new copy, the cards not even yet being out of shrink wrap. It's a great game, but I think we are perhaps in danger of playing this to death this year, it having appeared 6 times in 14 weeks. This was an introduction to the game for Paul and Donald and was very close for the first 3 places, with Donald back in fourth and I get the impression he wasn't greatly enjoying himself.

Going into the final scoring I was some way back but was able to sneak ahead with 10 points in resources and money behind my screen, while Paul could have won if he had been able to get the Tower completed and claim the bonus for most loyalty.

World Without End 100 mins.

Posn.

Player

Score

1

Dave D

53.5

2

Dave F

52

3

Paul

51

4

Donald

34

To finish the evening we had a quick round of 6 nimmt which I totally screwed up by playing my high cards early and being left with too low ones at the end meaning I tended to end up playing under several times.

6 nimmt 15 mins.

Posn.

Player

Score

1

Dave F

0

2

Paul

1

3

Donald

20

4

Dave D

28

Over on another table, Mike had dug out New England, this being the first play here since 2006 and I have to say that doesn't seem a day too long. That said there seemed to be much merriment going (although that could have people's cries of pain, self inflicted to keep awake).

New England 100 mins.

Posn.

Player

Score

1

Steve Pe

36

2

Mike

30

3

Ben C

28

4

Dave C

23

Also played here was Vom Kap Bis Kairo, a game not seen for a longer time (2004).

Vom Kap bis Kairo 45 mins.

Posn.

Player

1

Mike

2=

Ben C

2=

Steve Pe

2=

Dave C


On the other table Andy was providing Steve with his Wargame fix with Conflict of Heroes, Andy was the Soviets, Steve the Germans. Andy's comments:

"CoH uses a system of introductory firefights - allowing you to gain experience of the system - introducing more rules as you progress.

We played Firefight 1; a small scale infantry scrap using the updated Storms of Steel rules which improves the flow of the game.

With the limited ruleset for this Firefight luck can play a very large part and did so here with a great number of very jammy rolls for the Soviets.

After this we started Firefight 2 which introduces Hidden units and Group Actions allowing the movement of large groups of troops and powerful firegroup attacks. However after the death of a dithering Soviet Rifles squad counterbalanced by some brutally effective Soviet MMG fire at stacked Germans in open ground we ran out of time by the end of Turn 1."


2 comments:

  1. I admit, I wasn't thrilled by World Without End. I know some people in the group have previously commented that they don't like certain games because they feel like you're pushing cubes around. This is the first game I've played where I haven't been able to make any association between the theme and the actions. There seems to be no logical progression to events.

    As Dave F says, it's purely a game of survival. I expected some kind of economic engine worker placement in a similar vein to its predecessor. It may well be nothing more than a failure due to my preconception, so I'll try it again. Wasn't excited by it, however, despite all the prettiness.

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  2. I just noticed this comment, having apparently missed setting a subscription to the items feed. I can understand not liking the game in the sense that a lot of the game is reacting to the events that occur.

    I have to say though that the game seems to me to have about the most direct relation between the actions and the events which form the theme than any I can can think of. Essentially you gather things that you then spend for what seem entirely logical purposes (with the exception of loyalty, which seems to be a somewhat iffy concept).

    Another thing that I think the game has going for it is that everyone has the chance to do everything, there are no artificial limitations on actions imposed by such things as shortage of buildings in games like Puerto Rico or only one player can do each action, occurring in many worker placement games. It is these sort of limitations that tip the balance (to me) towards a session of rather uninteresting cube manipulation and an interesting evocation of a theme.

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