Doughnuts, Deadwood, Digging and...Uruk

On Friday, Crabro and I did join in with the games rather than escape to the outdoors, and the first thing we came across was one of the organisers sitting outside in the sunshine having a coffee with the manageress of the hotel while looking out across the calm sunny Sussex sea. Meanwhile inside, the moles sitting round various tables under artificial light were already earnestly engaged in discussing, learning, punching and playing board games.

There were a huge number about and one of those in the early stages of play was the game I had played the night before: Village. I immediately noticed that the pieces feeding into the market were face down and queried this to find that we had played it wrong. I don't know if this would have made a significant dent in Ma's score but it would have given her slightly more of a challenge at least.

The first thing Crabro and I did, was meet up with a representative of Heron Games and collect some recent purchases from their March sale, thus avoiding postage. Crabro had acquired another Stefan Feld game: Trajan, while I had bought Deadwood, because I love the worker-placement mechanic and the western theme. I had also bought a couple of little aeroplanes to go with my Wings of War: Dawn of War game at a very good price. I now have a little WWII Stuka and a tiny version of Douglas Bader's Hurricane to go with the little Wings of War First World War 'planes I already had.

Crabro and I had a nose around at what was being played and said our good mornings and then decided to break out my new toy. Having shared the joy of punching and what Crabro rather indecently likes to call "furtling" the new game, we set it up and started to try and get to grips with the rules. It proved to be quite simple in essence (a simple choice of two actions each turn - retrieve your cowpokes or put one onto a building) but we were still learning when a third player turned up, which was nice.

The game went fine except for one rather odd thing: The tag line on the box says "A game of Wild West duels" and we didn't have a single one. This might change with better appreciation of strategy and with four players but it did feel rather odd not needing to have a single shoot out. Still on my losing streak, I came last while our friend the organiser, from the seat in the sunshine, who was the player that joined us, came a convincing first after making a lot of useful income from a hotel.

Although it didn't play as I imagined, it has a good theme, nice solid Fantasy Fight cardboard and may yet play well with the Goldstone Gamers as a four, so I was far from disappointed.

For our next game Mike produced Uruk: Wiege der Zivilisation, and our lunches arrived. Mike held off on eating while he patiently explained the intricacies of the game but I'm afraid I was too hungry for good manners and tucked into my crisps, salad and sandwiches while Mike taught.

I wasn't entirely confident in the game and was still learning some of the cards at the end but the first game was enough to convince me that I like it and will put it on my (huge) wishlist. I won't go into detail but it involved using combinations of cards and cubes to place a settlement (of cards) and improve it: Final score being the current total of card scores but each one potentially modified by a multiplier of how many cities (piles of white disks) you have against each card. The details are here


Cakes came round as we chose what would turn out to be the last game of the day. I decided on a doughnut and we picked Pergamon a 2011 Stefan Dorra and Ralf zur Linde game themed on archaeology. Once again Mike had to teach but he did it very well and despite the fact I was beginning to feel rather tired I grasped the rules easily. In fact I couldn't quite believe I hadn't missed something and snatched a quick read of the rules while Crabro left the table for a few minutes. It was exactly as I had understood from Mike and is really a very simple Euro. I felt at home with this one immediately, being simple myself, and proceeded to break my losing streak with quite a convincing win having been quite confident for most of the latter half of the game. I suppose this one ought to be on that massive wish-list too.

A very pleasant day and I had been enjoying myself so much that I'd forgotten that we were missing another beautiful Spring day. We emerged from our geeky darkness to a beautiful seaside evening to remind us of a lost Spring day though. Oh well you can't do everything.