Back to ACWest and back to the Ramada. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.

Friday

After a smooth trip to Telford we began with two-player dnup. Not ideally the way I'd teach it, but I think this is the best two-player variant of a game I've tried. (I.e. of games that need two-player variants because they wouldn't work by the standard rules.)

On then to Compile: Main 1 (actually a mix of 1 and 2, and if the boxes it came in weren't so gorgeous I'd put it all in one larger one) which is only a two-player game, which is why I don't play it as much as I'd like. War and Clarity felt like a good combination, but Ice didn't synergise well for me.

On to Steampunk Rally Fusion: Atomic Edition and the first time I've played on the Mars track. (And I need to amend the rules to distinguish between "this happens when you enter the space", "this happens when you end a move on the space" and "this happens if you end your Race Phase on the space".)

Then Imperium: Horizons which works with anywhere from 2 to 4, but is a bit long for the Monday night neighbourly games so I mostly play it at conventions. (It works solo too, and I should try that again…) I took Celts against Japanese, and won by a single point—which I naturally ascribe to having used Cultural Diversity to carry on with Cattle Raids at least three times after we'd become civilised. (It's a "re-enactment", chaps.) Ma, as they say, Coo Noo.

Finally for the evening, Xenon Profiteer in which I managed to grab all three pipelines but for once not completely lose control of my hand.

Saturday

This was the full day of play, and we started with three-player Xia: Legends of a Drift System with one new player. So as not to take too long, we played to ten points, and while I got a solid early lead nobody was more than a point behind me by the end. We had Wormholes; they collapsed. We had Infection (take damage every time you roll a 1, pass it on to another ship when you're adjacent). We had one player trying to get the Ice Rock Jockey award, killed by the new player who then scooped the award too. Great stuff.

On to Sea Salt & Paper, in which I failed to get a 3-mermaid win.

Then Expo acquisition Gibberers (with the English translation pack), in which you're trying to convey increasingly complex ideas in an invented language. I'd played this once before at the Oxford Meeples meetup, when my prevailing impression was "fun stress"; this time it was more relaxed, "a party game for people who don't go to parties".

Then recent Kickstarter game The Sheep, basically a co-op escort quest as you try to get caravans across the board and defend them from mutant murder sheep (i.e. sheep). I found myself increasingly using lines from Aliens ("I only need to know one thing. Where. They. Are.", "Is this a stand-up fight, sir, or another lamb hunt", and "They mostly come at night. Mostly.") which seemed to fit the ethos.

As far as the game itself was concerned, there was an interesting arc of difficulty: it started off fairly easy, got tough in the middle as the caravans spread out, then towards the end as they gathered towards the exit point and left the board we found ourselves all powered up with relatively little to do. Still, good fun if a bit huge; I'll never buy it, but I'll play it again if someone has it.

On to King of Tokyo: Godzilla which is more or less the classic game with the actual named monsters—but there are also Evolution cards which give you a unique set of power-ups. I've never loved this game but I did have a good time.

Finally for the evening, Steampunk Rally Fusion: Atomic Edition again but on the Paris course, where Ada Lovelace romped to a win.

Sunday

I'd been meaning to try the Red Rains cooperative mode of Ashes (Reborn): Rise of the Phoenixborn and we finally got a chance to give it a shot. This feels to me as though it might originally have evolved from a Phoenixborn automatic player, but that may simply be because all the card effects from the rest of the game that are designed to do specific things to other players (not just inflicting damage on them) need to have analogues here. A bit fiddly, but great fun!

A quick game of Rush 'n' Crush while we waited for a couple of other players to be available. Lots of mines on the bridge!

Then dnup, which for me is still strictly better than SCOUT, but I can see how one could like both. (Sadly nobody wants my copy of SCOUT.)

And finally Omens, loosely a trick-taker but it's mostly about the special card powers. I rather liked this and may well pick it up at some point.

This was the last ACWest, but the original organiser is planning to carry it on as its own thing without the Airecon banner. Sign up for notification of that here.