RogerBW's Blog

Back to the Masonic Hall on a cold, but dry, weekend of boardgaming.

As usual, there was a lot of socialising, but the first game was Piepmatz, in which I managed to make several new sorts of mistake I hadn't considered before.

Then on to First in Flight, a eurogame of early aviation. The core of it is the aircraft deck, which has some mixture of good and bad cards in it; the rest of the game is about giving you various ways of adding different sorts of card to the deck, and manipulating it during test flights.

The main track uses the mechanism of the player at the back taking the next turn—but while in other games using this that's been an interesting choice between taking a few mildly-helpful actions or jumping ahead to do the thing one particularly wants, here the actions were so expensive that there was usually an obvious best available move.

Not a terrible game, but alas not at all to my taste in spite of the theme.

A long session of Xia: Legends of a Drift System (only one novice, but they played quite slowly) left me ember-mining and getting all the money while nobody else tried to stop me. (I think I might be unpleasant and say "no novices in a 5-player game" next time.)

On to Project L, with five players so using the line-clear variant (in effect two players take turns at the same time). This seemed to flow better for me than usual; I wish I could work out how I did it…

Always reliable, Deep Sea Adventure. Glub, glub, glub.

Machi Koro: Bright Lights, Big City is one of several editions that try to fix the rules brokenness of the original game. Like MK2, this one does it by randomising what's available to buy each round. It felt very random and restrictive to me, but I came last, so maybe I was just playing it wrong.

On to Trio, which I played recently in Thirsty Meeples. Apart from a total failure of memory, this worked all right. (But I find the original Japanese art more appealing.)

Nokosu Dice with two players who'd never played any trick-taking game before—though the tricky point continues to be the way that trump cards (and dice) lose their colour. I'll emphasise this even more next time I explain it.

And a session of Flash Point: Fire Rescue in the garage. This started off very well, down to a single smoke at one point, but things soon exploded out of control and we had a close finish (not on damage cubes, more on potentially lost victims). Firefighters were CAFS, Generalist, Veteran and Captain, and we never felt any need to change roles.

Classic filler Zombie Dice, still a minimal game but still fun to chat over.

Finally, two runs of Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition. First, Harpy, Haka and Bunker against Citizen Dawn in Megalopolis.

Harpy started fairly slowly but was close to vanishing in the traditional birdsplosion by the time we won.

Then, Wraith, Expatriette and Mr Fixer vs Ambuscade on Insula Primalis. Wraith spent a lot of time suppressing the volcano with the Sonic Neutralizer while Mr Fixer punched it to death. Expatriette was defeated, but the other two brought it home, with the finisher being Mr Fixer's traditional crowbar to the face.