My ninth Airecon, and the eleventh anniversary. With images;
cc-by-sa on
everything.
Back to the Inn on Cheltenham Parade, though I didn't spend as
much time drinking there. Still excellent breakfasts, and I've already
booked in for next year. I don't know anywhere else that serves
Landlord Dark, and they keep it well.
Games started with Compile: Main
2, first time I've had a
chance to play with this set. Diversity has a very interesting tweak
that lets it be flipped without triggering a formal compile action… I
suspect the best way to play this is knowing all the cards, and
against someone else who also knows all the cards, but I don't get in
enough games to make this happen.
On to Project L, always
good fun.
And Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive
Edition with
Disparation content: Chrono-Ranger, Omnitron-X and KNYFE against
Miss Information in Silver Gulch. Tricky, but we made it.
Skull Queen next,
still an interesting tweak on trick taking. I still don't play
trick-taking games well but this is one of the ones that has helped
me to understand them better.
Then Imperium: Horizons,
Polynesians vs Martians. This was probably a bit over-complicated for
us at this time of night, and we didn't finish before we had to leave
the vanue, but we were each convinced we were losing.
By request, I had brought along Firefly: The
Game (even though it
takes up the space usually needed by one of my large game crates). I
took a "Goody Two Shoes" crew under Nandi, none Wanted, mostly Moral,
and just beat out Wright's "Human Resources" crew to be King of All
Londinium. This took about five hours in the end, as Firefly tends
to.
Tavarua next (with the
player who'd introduced it to me, but he didn't have his upgraded copy
that lets the waves slide down the board in a channel). There are some
fiddly timing concerns here and I think it's worth having someone as a
timekeeper to make sure everyone's in the same phase of the game at
the same time, especially at six players as we were.
After dinner out, back for Sea Salt &
Paper and sleep.
In the morning, out to the dealers' room in case of anything
interesting. I'm still not sure why the big game vendors bother,
really, since a game is fungible and it's easy to find out where it's
cheapest, but some of the smaller stalls were interesting.
No photos for the new Flip 7: With a
Vengeance. I feel edgy
about this: if I didn't already have Flip 7, I'd buy it. I'm not at
all sure there's any virtue in having both; any time I'd play one the
other would be an acceptable substitute. But then again it was fun…
and one player lost by half a point, having a score divider played
against him and ending up with 199½… and half rounds down.
On to Spokes, in which
you're trying to lay trails of the same coloured rods to make a route
round the racetrack. But the next player may be able to use the trail
you've just laid… which is how I ended up taking the final lap in one
move, Automobiles style, and indeed generating an infinite loop.
Good fun!
More racing, of a sort, with Steampunk Rally Fusion: Atomic
Edition. I ended up with
a remarkable lack of movement generators for much of the game, except
when I suddenly had several at once and could zoom ahead.
Faraway with the new
"Under Starry Skies" expansion. Unlike the first expansion this does
introduce some new rules, but I don't think any of us had trouble with
it. I asked the friend who was out in the trade hall to pick up a copy
for me, even before the game had ended.
Next was Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive
Edition: Captain Cosmic's
Inversiverse variant (the "good" version of his usual recurring
villain Galactra, I think, with an interesting power: turn a card,
then anyone can play any card in hand that shares a keyword with it),
Nightmist, Ra, and Darkstryfe/Painstake. versus Necrosis in Silver
Gulch. This was a long and tough one: Ra went down quickly and the
rest of us were struggling. Nightmist fell taking out a whole bunch of
Ongoing effects, and Cosmic kept Darkstryfe/Painstake pumped up while
they dealt damage. Hard work and I was expecting us to lose, but we
just barely made it in the end.
On to Nokosu Dice with
four, in which I carefully warned people about the Confusing Rule and
this mostly worked.
Out by the loos, there was a wooden dexterity game: your job is to
move the ring round the maze, by pulling the strings, without letting
the ball fall through any of the holes. (Other wooden games too, but
this was the one that seemed most fun.)
Next game was Decrypto,
in which I had my usual problem of being either too obscure or too
simple in my clue-giving, and not knowing which. But in the end we
outlasted the other team.
Getting late, but there was still time for Letter
Jam, which somehow we
managed better than any other game I've been in: even I got all my
letters (one questionable, but it fit in the same place either way),
and three of us got bonus letters.
Last game of the evening was
Project L, in which I
got into one of the traps that sometimes hits: no tiles that I could
fill in quickly to bootstrap into more pieces. So I got off to a slow
start, but it still went well (and we exhausted the white tiles before
finishing off the game).
Several of the people I'd been playing with had to miss Sunday, but I
got in a game of Xenon
Profiteer (lost by two
points to the new player).
Then, with no photographs,
Kluster, particularly
fiddly on the slippery neoprene mat.
Five-player Tenby, in
which I almost had a great idea: get one long street that qualifies
for everything. Sadly, I'd failed to realise that I needed to
complete (i.e. cap off at both ends) the street to do this, so I
missed out on quite a lot of points. Never mind!
Finally for the show,
Rossio, a mostly
abstract tile-laying game with a pleasing interaction of mechanics. I
did badly, as I almost always do in this style of game, but still had
a great time.
