Gaming Blogs

On Sunday the 3rd-Feb, I had been invited along to a 5-player game of Keyflower.  I had never played it before, so it was a learning experience for me.  Apparently we had 1 or 2 expansions in use as well, that basically meant more possible actions available to us. There's a lot to pay attention to, and even though much of the time I was able to make the move I had been planning, I ended up not scoring highly - I think I came last! This is one of those games where you really need to always keep one eye on the end -of-game scoring.  There *are* various bonus scoring tiles you can obtain near the end of the game, but if you focus too much on trying to get 1 or 2 of those, you'll miss out on other ways of scoring that can get you more points. I enjoyed playing it though, the mix of mechanics (mostly bidding and worker placement) works well and there is a lot of variety in the details.

Did manage to get to the card gaming in Grantham on Wednesday the 30th January, I had a first go at playing Keyforge.  I lost very badly, and didn't enjoy the playing of it.  It's certainly a game where, to get the most out of it, you need to know your deck beforehand, and what it's capable of! I also got in a game of Star Wars Destiny, which we didn't quite have time to finish, but I was losing quite badly.  I just used my first (and so far only) custom deck I've ever made, which has an aggressive leaning, and my opponent had a "mill" deck (one built to exhaust your opponent's deck before all of your characters are killed) which was very well put-together.  My opponent quite quickly got to have cards in play that burned through my deck really, really fast.  i still had fun playing it though (and learning how effective a mill deck can be in Destiny!)

No board games played this week, but I have been enjoying getting a bit back into Terraria on PC.  It's just a lot of fun, it's only 2D as opposed to Minecraft's 3D (they are somewhat similar games, although un-modded Terraria places more emphasis on combat) but it's a very slick, polished game, and together with the physics it uses and the cartoon-y graphics style, it easily gets you smiling.

We had a 6-player gaming day on the 19th.  We played a 4-race Flamme Rouge "tour", and then a game of Viticulture: Essential Edition. I really enjoy Flamme Rouge - it does have a bit of an element of chaos to it (maybe "organised chaos"!) but there is a level of strategy to it too.  In the end, I finished 4th out of the 6th of us, which wasn't bad considering I completely messed up on the 2nd race.  As part the tour, our great host had also organised a couple of extra ways for our cyclists to earn points in each race - King Of The Hill, which awarded decreasing amounts of points as each cyclist exited any hill stretches on a race, and also Agressiveness, which awarded points to cyclists who finished each round of a race at the front of the pack. I didn't do so well at Visitculture, but I do prefer the Essential Edition (it adds a couple of expansions) to the basic, and really our host won the game massively ahead of the other 5 of us, who finished all bunc