RogerBW's Blog

The Oxford Meeples had another quarterly games day (I've missed a few thanks to clashing events).

I arrived late thanks to a double accident on the M40, but as it turned out the first games of the day were just ending, and people felt enthusiasm for Xia: Legends of a Drift System (with newly 3d-printed storage system).

We played to 15 points, and ended up taking about 90 minutes per player - though a fair bit of that was in the early turns, with one complete novice, two with slight knowledge of the rules, and me as not terribly confident rulesmaster.

All the tiles came out (in part because one of the players was looking for a particular sector, which was of course next to last in the stack). We comprehensively overflowed my pair of 90×40cm "mousemats" (seriously, that's what they're sold as, about a tenner each and the cheapest non-logoed game mats I've found, hemmed edges and all).

Nobody went in for piracy, and therefore no bounty-hunting either. We got the Cinderbeard event, so had two Scoundrels on the board, but they never attacked player ships (one player became a target but hid in a nebula). Even the Merchant only got to about four worlds before the end of the game; there was some player trading, but mostly it was mining and then selling rather than following the trade routes.

And quite a few missions. If we hadn't followed the strict rules (end the moment someone achieves the victory value rather than finishing the round) we'd have had joint winners.

I really like this game. I ended up in third place but I'd been having a thoroughly good time trying things out once it was clear I was unlikely to win.