Mini-TringCons are all-day house gaming events run by the organiser of
TringCon, in Deepest
Buckinghamshire. Images follow:
cc-by-sa on
everything.
With six players present, we split into three and three; the
other group spent the whole day on
Robinson Crusoe,
only to lose on the final turn. We started with a standard-difficulty
game of
Leaving Earth.
We all tried to keep research costs down, and plumped for different
all-purpose rockets: I had Soyuz, while other players went for Atlas
and Saturn. Atlas probably was the best choice, and the player
opposite scooped up most of the easy missions (Man in Space, Man in
Orbit, Artificial Satellite) leaving only Space Station, Lunar Survey
and Venus Lander in play. He was fortunate in drawing a full hand of
Success outcomes for his Atlas boosters, while my Soyuz had a minor
and a major failure, and of course the major came up when there was a
cosmonaut on the top of the stack. Meanwhile, my opponent's Space
Station mission used most of the available Atlases to get a minimal
capsule into orbit…
I did score the Lunar Survey, at least, and while Venus Lander proved
impossible I was one year ahead of the opposition in discovering this
(though I still wouldn't have won, thanks to the -2 for cosmonaut
death). I think this game is better with harder missions (particularly
with more things to go wrong and remove an early lead), but it was
great to have it on a physical table at last, and an enjoyable
introduction for the other players. I will pretty much insist on
getting this out any time I have players who aren't terrified of a
mildly maths-y game.
A few rounds of
Red 7 before lunch.
We tried the scoring system, but I think it's better just to score
rounds won: if you end with a "highest card" or "most cards below 4"
you don't get as many points as you would for a "cards in a row" or
"most of same colour" win, and that's both an extra complication and
not particularly fun. (On the other hand I do like the feel of
removing the winning cards from successive rounds.)
El Gaucho
after lunch, a dice-placement game reminiscent in some ways of Alien
Frontiers. You're laying claim to cattle, as well as putting
dice on other spaces that give you special powers later. There's a bit
of complexity in what you claim when, and while I did quite badly as I
often do in these games I still had a good time.
Almost the last of my unplayed Essen 2015 purchases,
The Bloody Inn,
came next. You're murderous French peasants who are killing or
recruiting the various travellers who come to the inn. The theme isn't
a great match for the mechanics, but the card art is very well-suited
to the theme. It's hard to get right and I suspect against expert
players we'd be slaughtered, but we still had fun. I particularly like
the mechanic of shifting money back and forth between liquid funds
(which you use for paying your helpers, but which are capped at a low
value) and cheques (which aren't as negotiable, but you can have more
of them).
Finally Cacao,
which I found myself thinking of as "like Carcassone, only fun". Tiles
alternate between villages, owned by one of the players, and jungle
with resources, which are exploited by their neighbouring villages.
But the orientation of the cards also matters. There's a standard
Eurogame mechanic of different resources scoring in different ways
(this is most blatant, in my experience, in Between Two Cities) and we
ended up with a very close finish.
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