A return to Battlelore for more Borgy joy this Tuesday-Games-on-Wednesday. Two aging lads returning to gleeful schoolboyhood and unable to stop grinning as they set up another battlefield scenario from the exciting toybox of miniature soldiers.
This second scenario was still lore-free and somewhat historical although, unlike Commands and Colors: Ancients, the "Historical Notes" are sketchy at best and simply for some tongue-in-cheek flavour.
First side of the scenarios saw defeat for the English (me) who struggled to take three banners in the time the French achieved the necessary five. The second phase looked to be going the same way as I (as the French this time) was down to three very feeble looking units on my right flank (two at least down to their banner figure) facing some solid looking medium and heavy English soldiery.
Unfortunately, as I had in the first phase, Crabro ran out of cards for use on the appropriate flank. allowing me a surprising re-surgence including, finally, some success for my bowmen who had managed to fail to score a single hit with their "Darken the Sky" card at the start of the game. The cards were not ideal but did at least give me a chance to get some use out of what I thought of as moribund and unsaveable units. Thus two successive foot "onslaughts" each consisting of a single one figure unit miraculously turned the tide despite some hopeful calls for battleback by unsupported troops etc. The end result was that Crabro got none of the three banners I was expecting to finish the game in his favour and the score ended at 5-2 to me, giving me the overall win and demonstrating that sometimes lady luck suddenly turns her back on you in this game and you are sunk.
This system is the origin of my "whinging for Carthage" of course and I regard it as part of the fun to see a seemingly finished unit suddenly knock out a whole heavy unit in one go etc. Play enough games and the luck turns around. We seventy games of CandC and have every intention of hammering the Battlelore board in the same way. We are impatient to get going on the "lore" aspect of the game though so might skip some scenarios.
After lunch we decided to try another Stefan Feld game after being favourably impressed by Macao and more recently In the Year of the Dragon. This time it was Castles of Burgundy and it wasn't quite the love at first sight we had experienced with his other designs.
After a fairly lengthy rules learning session we attempted our first play and while we quickly found the flow of the game to be simple and fast the game felt much more "fiddly" as a result of each of the different building and knowledge tiles having different uses. The player boards, of which there are a number different versions, cleverly have a lot of the necessary information printed on them but it takes a while to assimilate the iconography in use necessitating repeated returns to certain pages of the rule book. The result was a run away win for myself but in the process I had missed at least one of the rules for a time so the score has to be taken with the pinch of salt usually required of a "learning game"
Our conclusions had an air of disappointment after how we had taken to Feld's earlier offerings and Crabro was already contemplating putting it up for sale. It seemed a bit soon to be thinking in those terms however and I think we will give it at least another chance before that. We were in fact happy with the concept and game flow as well as the mechanics of the game. The problem was only with the complexity added by the number of different tiles. This may well be taken care of by a good player aid which Crabro has now found and printed out. I look forward to giving this another crack.
28/2/2012
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