RogerBW's Blog

I drove to a village hall near Oxford, where the Oxford Meeples were restarting their periodic larger gatherings. All masked, hurrah.

The locals brought along a fair supply of games, so as it turned out my portable games library wasn't needed.

I fell more or less at random into Clash of Cultures, a 4X game in (a small part of) the ancient world – that turned out to be very clearly a conceptual ancestor to Star Trek Ascendancy in many small details.

The objective cards gave me some guidance, though this had to be tempered with sticking to one set of goals and not spreading my effort too thinly.

The early turns rattled by, though we soon got into the fiddly micromanagement side of things – helped by having only three actions per player-turn.

Technologies gradually developed, and I ended up being able to stand by while the other powers fought it out, exporting my religion to both sides. (All right, equal second place, but that's better than I expect to do in this sort of game.)

Probably about 4 hours in total, but great fun in spite of some issues with downtime in the later game.

Several games ended at about the same time, so we got together for Tsuro. Seven players, and an end state I'd never seen before: no eliminations at all until the very last pass round the table, so nobody ever drew new cards, and I tied with another player for last survivor.

Play continued, but I was feeling quite tired after a busy week so went home.