This long-running games convention had another instance at the start of July, on a sweaty weekend but not as hot as the last few have been. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.

Friday

After an uneventful drive, I got stuck in with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It's an odd game: you dash around Europe turning Invitations into Introductions, and Introductions into Prestige, or keeping them back to play as magic. When you use those to fill up cards, you gain Magicianship, which is what you want to win the game (with a minimum value, without which the big scary enemy will win instead).

Well, you can put Mrs Radcliffe on a card all you like, but she's still only worth three points or a green magic symbol. The magic you can play, which theoretically has elemental associations but which we rapidly descended into calling pink, blue, grey, etc., is sharply restricted by the event cards each round; you can expand that slightly with your powers, but you also can only play cards that are in your hand… and you need specific colours to fill up your Feats too. It felt like trying to get a needle through a stack of gratings, more frustrating than fun; there's also no player interaction apart from "I took that card that you wanted" and "I have more prestige than you so I go first". Not a game I'll be rushing to play again, alas.

We went on to Evil High Priest, which arrived last December but which I hadn't yet played. It's clearly designed by and for Americans with big tables, but it's a fairly straightforward worker placement game in which you're building up multiple currencies (treasure, blood, magic, spellbooks) with the aim of smashing the Elder Signs that hold your preferred Great Old One in thrall.

It felt perhaps a bit bigger and more complicated than the mechanics could really justify, but once we got the hang of it it moved along fairly quickly. Good fun and I'll play again, though it may not end up staying in my collection. Definitely needs a better rulebook.

Then I got into a playtest of Phil Masters's current secret RPG project (not actually a secret but I won't bruit it about here, except to say that a Brown Bess was involved).

Saturday

Hotel Breakfast is a Good Thing.

Started the gaming day with Mag·Blast (Third Edition), in which I did entirely terribly. Last time it was a long game in which I slugged it out and won; this time it was over quickly, thanks to some effective and aggressive play.

Next, a post-apocalyptic role-playing session with Dr Bob, in the Summerland setting. It's a haunting world, though we didn't dig far into the "using your mental trauma to be more effective" side of things. Definitely good fun, and not the sort of game I'd have tried without knowing the GM.

Then we settled down for several sessions of Flash Point: Fire Rescue. First the garage, three players, where the Rescue Dog did a sterling job while the rest of us ran around squashing the fires. A relatively easy win, which set us up for what happened next.

The High Rise board, with four players, was more of a challenge, and things went quite badly.

Finally the Hotel board, with six players. We did manage to set up a conveyor to get the victims out, and had enough revealed to win; for a while we were holding at three remaining damage cubes, with a combination of Suppression Specialist to move the fire into the eastern half of the building, and Driver/Operator to put it out with the deck gun. But this couldn't last for ever, and it didn't.

Another cooperative game of things going horribly wrong, in Red November. Where Flash Point is a game in which you have lots of things you can try and have to choose between them, this felt sticky; there was almost always one obvious thing to do, but actually managing to do it was very hard work. I like the timekeeping system, though.

Finally for the night, Flamme Rouge, with hills but no supply zones or cobbles. A tough race, and a game that showed its subtlety in spite of some really quite simple rules.

Sunday

Chat with friends, then a couple of games of Red7 (no photos) before I set off early for home to meet friends there.