Games Day 2 - 20 September 2014

On Saturday, we held our second Games Day, following the first held back in April. 18 people attended for some or the whole day and a total of 22 games were played. The total number of people is down on the previous figure but the number of games played is actually up, I think due to the number of short fillers played in between the longer games. Dave C took a few photographs throughout the day and has said he'll pass them on, so I hope to add them to this post if they fit in with what I've written. For more details of events read on.

First up for me was Eldritch Horror, which is a game I've played a fair bit this year outside the club with Dave C and also solo. For this game I was joined by Dave & Ben, together with Ben's friend Matt and Steve H, who has been playing a bit of Arkham Horror lately and was interested as to how the two compare. We played against Azathoth with the Forsaken Lore expansion and the characters played were-

Dave D: Lola Hayes
Steve H: Lily Chen (later Silas Marsh)
Dave C: Jacqueline Fine
Matt: Norman Withers
Ben: Mark Harrigan

We were up against it right from the start in this game as the first mystery required the defeat of Tulzscha and we took too long to do this allowing the build up of Eldritch tokens on the omen track, meaning that Doom lurched forward when the Green Comet was reached, this combined with an alarming build up of gates (2 at a time with 5 players, compared with 1 with 4) causing doom to move far too quickly.

We weren't helped by the early Dark Pact taken by Mark, which  triggered at the first chance requiring the sacrifice of a character. After some discussion, Lily was chosen and Steve took Silas as his new character. In retrospect, I think this was the wrong choice as Lily was in the best position to take on Tulzscha. Lola might have been a better choice as she suffered a torrid time early on, delayed and then lost in time and space in quick succession. To cap it all we seemed to suffer terrible dice in the early stages, rarely rolling successes however many dice were rolled, late in the game it seemed to go to the opposite extreme although it was really too late at this stage.

We eventually defeated Tulzscha and just about made a start of on the second mystery before Azathoth awoke and destroyed the world.

We then filled in with 3 games of Tsuro, while waiting for another group to finish off before splitting the 2 groups into 3.

I now had a 4 player game of Acquire with Mike, Stan and Jon. Jon and Stan had never played before. Acquire can sometimes be frustrating when you can't get the tiles you need. Ideally you will be able to put together a set of tiles in one area of the board allowing you to form a chain and have some control over how it merges, or maybe have some control over the expansion/merging of a chain formed by someone else which you can compete in. In practice this does not always happen and you are forced to either try and split your resources or concentrate your resources across a number of chains in the hope that you will get a tile to allow a merger that will get you some money. This was the story of my game and being completely frozen out of the early mergers (other than selling a few shares), I probably wouldn't have scraped third if others hadn't been to concentrated on other things to notice beat me out of second place in Tower.

After that we broke off for something to eat, getting quick games of Zombie Dice on one table and This town ain't big enough for the 2-4 of us on another.

After tea it was Battlestar Galactica, characters as follows:

Mark - Cylon Leader Aaron Doral
James - Felix Gaeta
Dave D - President Romo Lampkin
Matt - Gaius Baltar (Daybreak Version)
Ben - Kara "Starbuck" Thrace
Dave C - Admiral William Adama

It turns out that we had 2 Cylons from the start in addition to the leader, one of whom (Matt) had never played before, so perhaps they did not make life as difficult for humanity as they might have. Mark as the Cylon leader seemed benign until the sleeper phase when he decided to stop infiltrating, I believe that at that stage he discovered that he needed a Cylon victory.

There weren't many Cylon attacks early in the game although Treachery in skill checks kept the Vipers busy even if Starbuck couldn't get into space for a period due to a damaged Hangar Bay and a mysterious lack of repair cards. After sleeper things got a bit more difficult but the humans won out although all resources were in the red.

After that there was time for a couple of games of Lost Legacy, which seems very like Love Letter.

Other major games played were Power Grid on the Italy map, only 4 of the current maps now remain unplayed this year. This group including Bob, Jonathan, Scott and Tony (who we last saw in 2004 so it was nice to see him again) then played Traders of Genoa which seemed very long a look back at the earlier games played here seemed to show somewhat shorter play times.

The other big game was Dead of Winter, which Steve won (as the betrayer), the first time anyone has won here in this game. I was surprised to see Gordon in this game as it does not strike me as his thing at all, maybe I should suggest he join us for a game of BSG.

All in all, the day seemed to go well so we'll look to do this again. How do people feel about January, May, September as an approximate timetable? Although as I mentioned on the day, perhaps January may be potentially problematic if the weather is bad.

For a round of the details see the stats pages, also this geeklist.