Weekend Boardgaming: 7th July 2012

Its my 5th Anniversary today! And as a treat, I brought our Huskie, Comet, to the beach to play and romp around. Its been too long since we last brought him and I am very glad he still loves the waters and swimming. ;)

After that I had a small group of 3 others over and we played boardgames. 2 heavy hitters and a few light ones to round off the night. Here we go!

Empires of the Void

One from the group is eager to try Eclipse and since I am still on the fence about buying it (I already have Twilight Imperium 3 and now Empires of the Void), we decided to break this out to play and have a go at it. This time round, the game play was quite smooth and I felt more at ease at the game and knew what I was doing. I had the humans this time but as luck would have it, most of the planets where I can score diplomatic victories against were in someone else's quadrant. Worse, the culture cards I drew were like a rainbow (i.e. not many of the same kind) thus I had to venture far into my opponent's areas, which triggered a retaliatory action that ended up with me very dispersed and missing my New Earth. In the end though, the scoring between 3 of the 4 players were only 1 point apart! I think it will get better with subsequent plays. I am puzzled though because some of the neutral pieces shows different colors of the base ships each player has (i.e. Centipede and Diplomat). I am curious as to when these will come into play. Quite a fun game but I think unless I play Eclipse once, I won't know for sure which is a stayer in my cabinet amongst the 3.

Vinhos

I am so glad I can bring this out again to play as I think just 1 play is not enough to get a good grasp of the game. Explaining the game is again a very tedious affair as new players have to absorb so many different areas of a very busy board which equates to many different mechanisms. When we finally play it, all the players found that there are so many things they want to do but are severely limited by the amount of money they have and by the turns. I think explaining the game will get easier IF I manage to get this into play more often. In this game, our export area and the wine masters area seems very underutilized. Its not from a lack of trying but we found we had other important things to do as well to try to get enough money to do what we want in the game. Very tight game and the top 2 were only 1 point apart. I was far behind 3rd. Definitely a must try again to see where this will be in my cabinet's future!

Nuts!

After our Pizza dinner (this is becoming a common boardgaming grub), we decided to go with lighter games since we already had 2 rather long games (almost 3 hours each). I just had my latest shipment of boardgames (Pastiche for my colleague, Feudality and Nuts! for me) and decided to break out Nuts since it looks rather funny and easy to play. This is a game I CANNOT wait to bring to office to try with my gaming group. I think they will have a lot of fun because it is a rather tongue-in-cheek and VERY cheeky and "naughty" game. The general word play is with the word "Nuts" and so we have cards like "Protect your nuts", or "Poke someone's nuts". All in all, I cannot wait for it to be played next week in office :) Its fun and very light hearted and meant to play that way and not to be taken too seriously. Definitely party game material!

Samurai - The Card Game

Final game of the night is Samurai the card game. This is an abstract game where players are trying to vie for majority of tokens of any 2 (Circles, Squares and Triangles). Failing that, there is another method of scoring (but this seems a bit messy to me). During your turn, you play a card from your hand of 5 (all players have the exact set of cards) and try to obtain a majority in numbers of shapes as depicted in the village/town card that they are adjacent to. The graphics is light and quite nicely done. The cards are squarish and the game unfortunately can take up a lot of table space so beware of that. It is easily explained and quite fast to play and I did have fun even though I think I was dead last. Not bad not bad.


So all in all, a good day of gaming. Even though we did not get to try Mage Knight I will like to try a solo play of it first before tabling it. Now to go read up on Feudality :)