Spirit Games, supplying gamers with board games, card games, roleplaying games, d20, wargames and miniatures, for 20 years.

Posts on the Big Bang Burger Bar by our Wednesday night players, reproduced by kind permission of zarniwoop:

Title: Re: Spirit Games Wednesday Night - 2010
Post by: zarniwoop on 20 April 2010, 20:01:39

Wednesday 14th April
This week Richard bought along his copy of Dominion: Alchemy, the latest expansion for this card game. As usual the quality of the artwork is of a high standard and the gameplay sufficiently different to make this an interesting addition to this line of games. You know have a Potion treasure card which is required in order to purchase certain cards, there is also the addition of new cards with some very interesting actions available. I will not go into these as quite frankly most of them I have already forgotten as they was a lot going on :) Suffice to say that I enjoyed this very much and would definitely like another go of it sometime, if only to try and get a higher score as I did rather appallingly in my game, Richard having gotten a fantastic combination of cards going scoring him most of the Province cards and leaving him with quite a significant winning score...

After this we played an older but still classic game Thurn and Taxis which Richard wanted to learn how to play, so after talking through the basics we got started. Both myself and Carole have played this game a lot as we really like this game, but despite this I managed to make some disastrous choices meaning I wasted my first two turns. I then spent the rest of the game trying to catch up, which I did not too bad a job of but Richard had made a firm grasp of some of the strategies of the game and forced the end game leaving Carole and me with nothing we could do on our last turns. Needless to say Richard won...

Title: Re: Spirit Games Wednesday Night - 2010
Post by: carldjcross on 10 April 2010, 19:30:35

Wednesday 7th April
There's been a lot of buzz about a game themed around evolving organisms these last few weeks. This isn't it and I haven't played it yet (whatever it's called) but Usuruppe or Primordial Soup is sufficiently like it to jog Richard's memory to bring this. This is a fairly abstract game where each player attempts to feed his organisms so that they can thrive. To be full each organism must eat one cube of each other colour in play at which point it happily poohs out two of it's own colour.

It's a lot more complicated than that of course; for a start the organisms float around in the primordial soup pretty much at the mercy of the currents. As the game evolves so do your organisms gaining Cosmic Encounter style rule breakers like being able to move at will or only having to eat one less of the colours than everyone else.

Richard started the game doing his usual thing of building machines, keeping back resources to buy higher value genes as early as he could. Peter however decided to carry a big stick and go all out for aggression buying the "eat other players" gene early on. I did mention that there is often only one of each gene didn't I? Phillsey and I went for altogether more peaceful powers.

Peter did for my chance of getting anywhere near the top of the score track by eating several of my organisms in the middle game putting me forever behind, not helped by the essentially reactive powers I'd chosen. Richard was snapping at Peter's heels with Phillsey making a late break for the top but the billy goats gruff strategy worked well leaving Peter comfortably ahead at the end. This is a very gamers game with lots of thinking but surprisingly few choices. A pleasant enough way to spend the evening but not one I'll be asking to play again anytime soon.

Title: Re: Spirit Games Wednesday Night - 2010
Post by: zarniwoop on 20 April 2010, 19:47:32

Wednesday 7th April
Tonight we had a game of MagBlast which claims to be a 10-20min game but more realistically that is per person that plays!! This was at Pete's request as he had managed to escape from the computers this week. After a few early culls (myself included) it was a fight between Phil, Carole, Pete and Sally, having pulled together a quite awesome fleet Pete had to bail so I took over for a brief period, followed by Phil after his elimination by the Girls. It was then a straight duel between the girls, where I believe Sally was victorious. (Actually is was Carole that won - Sally).

Whilst the Mag-Blast epic continued I took some of the vanquished into a game of Krysis which I am really getting to like a lot. I still have only played the basic game but at the moment there is enough gameplay and variety there is no great compulsion to try out the variants. Each player runs a team of extreme archaeologist's trying to get as many gems and artifacts out of a mine as possible. Sometimes stealing them from opponents campsites, selling some to the bank for victory or carrying them to home for safety. Always a fun little game, which is not too complicated and plays quite quickly.

Title: Re: Spirit Games Wednesday Night - 2010
Post by: carldjcross on 06 April 2010, 21:29:07

Wednesday 31st March
Apparently Andy was dying to try out Sector 41 and hadn't as yet managed to persuade his family to do so. Good job Paul, Frog and myself where there to oblige then. I do like a good space exploration game and it's surprisingly difficult to find one. Lots come close (Dust, Galactic Emperor) but fall somewhere along the way, often, it seems to me on the (s)lightness of the game/time it takes to play axis. No such trouble here. 2 hours it said on the box and 2 hours it was rules explanation included.

The board is randomly laid out using tiles with various galactic features marked on them, face down of course to be explored as the players send out their ships into the inky blackness. The game's USB is the ability to bend space by pushing a row of tiles up one tiles worth hopefully moving the dilithium crystals (thems your points then) nearer to you and/or further away from everyone else.
My first impressions where that there's an awful lot of luck in this game. Not so much of a problem since this is quite a short game. Both Andy and myself fell foul of early asteroid belts and I was beginning to think this was a celestial Snakes and Ladders with it's miss a (actually 2 or 3) turns and various bits and bobs that zapped you around the place.

We made up for our early bad luck by finding a couple of good point seams near to our bases and ended the game first and second but I'm still not convinced it was down to a large dollop of luck.

And on to a “quick” game of Carson City before going home. If this game were being pitched to Hollywood execs it would be Puerto Rico meets Hacinda. Probably. Players compete to own packets of land and build various point scoring buildings on them. Scores are multiplied by nearby buildings or geography. Since this is a western themed game you can of course fight over the spaces using revolver counters and a good ole dice roll.

To be honest I can't remember that much about it now (it was last week after all and it was very, very, very late by the time we'd finished) beyond than two salient points:
1) It was very good.
2) I completely cocked up the last turn and threw the victory Andy's way.
Future plans for this are to start the evening with this and end it with a suitably silly Bang if enough gunslingers can be found.

Title: Re: Spirit Games Wednesday Night - 2010
Post by: zarniwoop on 29 March 2010, 13:47:14

Wednesday 17th March
Tonight we started off a couple of games of Bucket King an old classic, Frog and then Philsy being the winners of these. We then moved onto a one-lap race of Rush & Crush, this is a really neat little racing game. After quite a lot of pushing and shoving, mine laying etc. there was a collective burn everything and push for the finish line. Car after car crashed and burned until in the end Sylvia won.

We ended the evening with Franks Zoo another classic game, always fun playing this one, a set collecting game where you need to collect certain animals to avoid penalties. One player starts by placing a card and then each other player plays more of the same animal than the last player or trumps it with another animal(s) indicated on the placed card(s). The last player to place cards grabs the pile once everyone else has passed. This was won by Philsy....

Title: Re: Spirit Games Wednesday Night - 2010
Post by: carldjcross on 11 March 2010, 17:52:22

Wednesday 10th March
First, an apology: apparently I've been missing the 'e' in Carole's name, an unforgivable omission which I'm going to put right straight away.

Tonight's happy bunch of gaming elves were: Paul, Frog, Sally, me and e' it's Carole (sorry). We started off with a four player Scrappers which was always going to be interesting since there were five of us leaving Sally and myself to make some sort of weird Beeblebroxian composite creature; shudder at the very thought of it.

You know we really should stop being so nice to each other. We spent most of the game politely grabbing the bits we needed until someone won. Only in the closing stages of the second game was there any takethatery going on. Frog won the first game (and didn't tell us until we were half way through the next turn) and I won the second after Sally had wandered off to interrogate the computer. These two facts may not be related.

Sator (etc) was our second game this evening. This is always a close game and I'm always surprised it's taken 2 hours. You're always just on the verge of winning if you can only move that little piece there. Of course by the time your turn comes around again that piece is either on the other side of the board, wedged in a corner or has been destroyed entirely. Frustratingly good fun.

Paul came close until we all ganged up on him leaving the way clear for Carole to execute a daring spell enhanced jump between platforms to win.

No session report from me last week since I was playing a practice Star Wars Minis game with Frog in which Darth Vader met a very uncomfortable end indeed. But that really is another story.

Spirit Games (Est. 1984) - Supplying role playing games (RPG), wargames rules, miniatures and scenery, new and traditional board and card games for the last 20 years

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