The Oxford Meeples had another
quarterly games day, and I had a great time again.
Most of the session was Nemesis:
Lockdown, which I'll
confess I don't love as a game: random things will mess you up however
good your plan. (Of course this is also true of games I do love, like
Firefly and Xia, but I think this feels meaner, perhaps because
the environment is much more aggressive even if you are trying to
avoid going out and poking it.) That said, I still had a good time
because of the company. After something like an hour of explanation
and two and a half hours of play, my character died—but they had at
least completed their objective first. (The alien nest was on fire
when I found it, honest.)
The game went on for another hour, but I hopped tables to play
Penguin Party, a
remarkably simple and emergently complex game. (It's a Knizia, not one
I've heard of but that doesn't mean much. Apparently it has been
rethemed as Game of Thrones: Westeros Intrigue.) Each
turn, play a card into the triangle; maximum base width 8, must touch
another card, can't overhang, if above two other cards must share
colours with at least one of them. When you can't play, you take
penalty points equal to cards left; if you empty your hand, you can
give back two penalty points. I could feel strategies forming
themselves, but not in time to avoid a comprehensive defeat.
Then on to
Castle Combo, in which
you're buying cards from markets to assemble a tableau, and the scores
of many cards depend on what other cards you have. I concentrated on
one of the simpler options, that lets you put money onto cards to
count towards the final score (which otherwise it doesn't), and ended
up with a surprise runaway victory.
I enjoyed all the games; I have no immediate plans to buy any of them,
but I'd gladly play the latter two again, and even Nemesis with the
right company.