This small one-day boardgaming event
happens twice a year in a village hall in Deepest Buckinghamshire, and
has been going for quite a few years. This was my fourth visit.
First game of the day was
Steampunk Rally,
which is just about starting to make sense to me. (The trick, I think,
is to regard it as a card game with a complicated scoring track,
rather than as a race game with cards.) There are many resources to be
traded off; I concentrated on movement at first, then on repair to
keep the movement working, and this seemed to go fairly well.
I was happy to see that Lise Meitner had built the world's first
subterranean airship.
And I ended up winning (thanks, rocket boosters!), though only by two
spaces. As is traditional, only the machine's cockpit made it to the
end of the course.
We went on to
Battlestar Galactica,
which I hadn't played before; it combines social deduction with
resource management mechanics. I tend to prefer purer social deduction
games like The Resistance, but this went pretty well.
Of course Adama was a Cylon.
We made a fair job of dealing with the enemy, but by the time we were
ready to jump it could get pretty hairy.
Of course Tom Zarek was the other Cylon.
We ended up running out of resources with just one more jump needed.
Could have been worse, for a first play for me and second for some of
the others.
Next was
Archaeology: The New Expedition,
a fairly random but enjoyable set-collection game. I got the feeling
it was really intended for fewer players, but we didn't take it
terribly seriously and still had a good time.
With a couple of the players leaving, we tried a round of
Red 7: it's still a
tricky one to explain, but I continue to spread the word. It's pretty
much the closest I get to old-fashioned card games.
Finally,
Hey, That's My Fish!,
which I've seen occasionally but never played before.
In spite of its appearance it's a fairly cunning game of blocking off
one's opponents, and I was surprised to come equal second out of three
with an experienced player.
The next Tringcon will happen on 1 October.
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