After a really enjoyable, and encouragingly well-attended, Saturday all-dayer at the Club, perhaps we should have expected a bit of a quieter next session, but still we got 8 for the next Wednesday session. One table of 4 settled for our perennial Club favourite Power Grid, though it was a first time for Michael and finished the night off with Love Letter (Batman version), while I joined Stan, Steve W and Mark W for a game of Scoville, a new game to 3 of us themed around pepper farming. The explanation was reasonably straightforward with a few very familiar mechanics like blind auction for turn selection, moving around a board grid picking up goods and blocking others, fulfilling open contracts, etc., and I guess with the cute graphics and pretty little pepper pieces it looked a fairly light game.
Wrong.
There are two action phases involving the grid of peppers, but if you go first on the planting order, to set up a nice combination of peppers on the board to move around and collect the other peppers that they produce, you go last on the movement phase and could find the nice combos you have set up are blocked off. This unfortunately induced analysis paralysis in me in particular, trying to work out how successful I wanted to try to be in the auction for turn selection, then trying to choose my position if I had a choice, then trying to get my head around a 'these two colours of peppers produce that one colour' reference grid which was only partly logical in terms of the colour palette, whilst trying to decide which contracts I wanted to fulfil and whether others could claim them before me. I spent the longest time thinking and came last, perhaps not my type of game but I would give it a second try, whilst Stan gained a good victory.
We finished off with Nottingham, a clever little card game of 'give and take' from Uwe Rosenberg, I messed this one up, made lots of triplets but didn't pick up a single bonus card, which is always a bad sign, and misjudged the game end with a further 17 points in my hand I couldn't claim. Last place again!