More gaming with nearby friends.
This evening's game was A War of
Whispers,
which I've never actually played before with the physical bits. A new
expansion has been announced recently, and I wanted to get a sense of
whether I wanted to buy it—and indeed whether I wanted to keep this game.
For this set, I borrowed an idea from the Tabletop Simulator mod, and
3d-printed farms, cities and towers in the various empire colours.
This adds a great mass of bits, but makes it much easier to read
the board and work out how many farms the green empire has right now
(including the one all the way over there), something one often needs
to do during the game.
(The deluxe version had plastic minis for these, but you still had to
put an allegiance marker on them. Also it replaced the cubes with more
miniatures, and I like cubes.)
We also used the informal patch, raised to official status in the most
recent edition, that everyone starts with a different empire in their
×4 scoring slot, because the most usual failure state of the game is
that everyone ends up ranking the empires in the same order and
scoring the same number of points.
Anyway, a first game for everyone but me, and I think the first round
was a certain amount of working out what was possible. Once we'd gone
through the first few empires, though, it all picked up as things
started to make more sense.
This feels like one of those terribly complicated
dynasties-in-collision sorts of game, but I think because the combat
is determinedly trivial—if the defender has a fort, attacker loses
one army, then remove one attacker and one defender at a time until
only one side is left—the focus stays on the worker placement round
the edge of the board, and on what one can do with the actions one
ended up with.
Am I going to keep it? On this showing, certainly. Will I get the
expansion? I'm interested, at least, though overseas crowdfunding
campaigns are just too much of a risk and too little reward for me
these days, so I'll wait until it's available in the UK or at Essen.
Although I do this for a lot of games, I think my mini
rulebook was very helpful in keeping
things straight. The supplied rules book isn't bad exactly, at least
in its most recent edition, but it has a lot of verbiage which makes
it hard to find things in a hurry.