Gaming Blogs

So, on Wednesday 24th, I played a 3-player game of Pandemic: Iberia , at a local boardgame cafe.  Prior to this, i have played "vanilla" Pandemic 4 times, and won on 3 of those attempts. Well, the Iberia version feels somewhat trickier.  We thought we were doing well with setting up our rail network and getting on with purifying water, but we had only researched 3 of the 4 diseases by the time the city cards ran out (hence ending the game) Yesterday, I was able to play 3 games: Coimbra - I found this very enjoyable, although it helped that I managed to get the hang of it early on, ending the game as the winner! we played a 4-player game of it so I was very happy with this result.  It has a number of gameplay mechanics to grasp, and i formulated a plan early on, basically maximising the victory points I earned at each move/action I did.  There's worker movement, card buying, and several resource income tracks that can also score victory points at the end.  A ...

Regular writing attempt #99 I really want to maintain my blog, so once more I'm going to make a concerted effort to post regularly! Simply as a blog/online diary, rather than anything more. So this past week, I've completed mission 4 (Manhattan) on Splinter Cell:Chaos Theory, admittedly following a guide online.  It took a while of game time in total but I got a reasonably high completion (I think i was rated 87%) I also completed the current mission on Company Of Heroes - I'm playing through the first of the single player campaigns.  This mission was the defence of Carentan, i think.  I'm enjoying the game a lot - it's an interesting mix of real-time strategy, but still with some tactical depth, including a genuine limit on the number of men you can have in your force, which really forces you to consider the best makeup of unit types for the current mission (or current stage of the current mission, as most comprise more than one) It *does* have in-mission savi...

On Friday, the 20 th October, I played (my first ever) a game of Scythe . In the end it was just a 2-player game, so a nice introduction for a newbie like myself. I found it somewhat similar to Euphoria, which I own a copy of, but with added PVP combat (Euphoria does not have that) The scoring was quite close- I ended with 70 points to my opponent's 74. It took me a few turns to get the hang of the different actions and bonuses and how it all works, together with the resources costs. I would definitely like to play this again, preferably with more players. It's basically a worker placement game, also with an element of area control. Really, you're trying to put together an engine for generating victory points. There are a number of ways to earn victory points (just money in this game) and there are several levels of each type of scoring, that you progress up through by completing certain actions. On Sunday 22 nd , I went along to a 3-player game of Eldritc...

Yesterday I did a little PC gaming - I solved another 2 puzzles on Samorost 3.  I think I'm nearing the end of this all-too-short masterpiece from Amanita Design .  I love all their games anyway and am prepared to support them through purhcasing their games, even at full price.  I am on the orangey-red planetoid, First i had to look at the hints for the coloured blobs puzzle.  I had got it partly figured out (changing all of the blobs to one colour) but had not found that then, you keep combining them until you just have one big blob.  This termporaily opens up the crashed "Sputnik"-style space craft, revealing a story book of 2 chapters, that kind of explains the immediate history of this planetoid and how it came to be in the position it is now. The other puzzle I solved was the totem poles thing.  Again, i had actually figured out what to do, just somehow hadn't quite got the 3 poles in the right positions. When you do, the wheel with the rope around it...

On Friday 29-September this year, I was introduced to Monty Python Fluxx , a quick card game.  We played 2 games of this in the pub.  Luckily I am a bit of a fan of Monty Python stuff so i wasn't completely out of my depth! Fluxx is a general card game engine that has a number of official, themed versions available.  The general idea is that some cards add to, change, or remove existing rules, some cards do the same but for win conditions, and then there are cards you can keep in front of you (until someone else steals them or they get moved on) and cards you can play against other players.  Monty Python Fluxx has all of these cards themed with Monty Python references.  For example, one of the rule cards says you can draw an extra card on your turn if you can sing a bit of a song from any Monty Python production.  It also says if no-one else has sung from the same song, you can draw 2 extra cards. It''s easy to get the basics down and the game plays quite...

So, I am hoping to write posts a little more often than I have been doing. I haven't even posted once this year! On Friday 22-Sep, I played my first game of Splendor at lunchtime. This is a nice, quick and pretty simple card game. Our 3-player game of it took about 25 minutes. And I was 2nd, not last, even though the other 2 players had played before! It's an enjoyable filler game, the basic idea being to collect resources, which you the use to build buildings (represented by cards) Check it out at boardgamegeek.com After work on the same day, I managed to arrange a 4-player game of Cthulhu Wars. Cthulhu Wars is the jewel in my own game collection, and I have most of the expansions for it. In this particular session, 2 of the other 3 players had played once before, and the other twice before. I had played 4 times before. We had 3 of the 4 base game factions in play (Crawling Chaos, Yellow Sign, and Great Cthulhu) and I played as Sleeper, one of the playable faction ex...