To the Castle Tap for more games. Images follow:
cc-by-sa on
everything.
The Castle Tap used to be the Horse and Jockey, and is just west
of the centre of Reading on Castle Hill, at mapcode QKH.60. Now it
specialises in two things, real ales and local cheese, and does them
both very well indeed. I shall certainly have to come back here some
time when I'm not driving, or indeed playing games.
My first game was
Between Two Cities:
it's a tile-laying game like a greatly-simplified version of
Suburbia, but each player is working on filling in two cities, one
with each of his immediate neighbours, and ends up scoring points
equal to the value of the lower of the two. There's also drafting: you
start with seven tiles, play two into your cities, and pass the others
to your neighbour for the next turn. Yes, it's a big gimmicky, but it
works. Like so many set collection games, most tiles are worth more
each the more you have of them, some are worth more in sets of limited
sizes, and so on. In the middle of the game there are double-sized
tiles which have to be worked into place too.
It's enjoyable – not as immediately engaging as I found Suburbia,
but not a bad game and one to try again. Definitely better with a
large group; we played with the maximum seven, the recommended minimum
is three, and I think that small game would be rather less fun.
(Rather to my surprise I came second, and the top three were only
single points apart.)
Then
Champions of Midgard,
a worker-placement game with shades of Lords of Waterdeep and some
other influences. You recruit Viking warriors (dice) of different
sorts and gather various resources, then go off to fight monsters.
Because I misinterpreted a victory condition card, I ended up going
after lots of small local monsters rather than voyaging overseas to
fight the high-scoring ones (I can't help feeling those distant
"monsters" should be labelled things like "Saxon village" and
"defenceless monastery"), but by accruing lots of them I still took
second place. The scores were much more spread out on this one but it
was still good fun, and I'll give it another go if the occasion
arises.
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