Spiel

Top notch work Adam! Looks like an awesome place to be, reckon it would be good if we could get a few people together for next year's event. Great video too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ky1mg9fwM

Dominion

And there were loads of people playing Domion. There was a new expansion pack being sold.

We stood proudly by the posters.

Essen Report

Wow.
Can't wait to go back again.
So much to do and see. And Dan, there was a German Celtic Death Metal Music store. Kind of Middle Earth Rock. There were a lot of Phantasy geeks there, so you could buy plastic armour and weapons and even hacked off limbs.

Sam, check these photos out...




























Contents

PURCHASES
1. Bausack
2. Trias
3. Mord Im Arosa
4. Geistesblitz
5. Agricola Fairy Deck
6. Russia/Japan board for Power Grid

PLAYED
1. Wings of War
2. A La Carte
3. Tikal II
4. The Magic Labyrinth
5. Findevier
6. Mr Jack (pocket)
7. Glen More
8. King Up
9. FunFair
10. Pirate vs. Pirate
11. Zooloretto
12. Zooloretto Mini

DISCUSSED WITH AUTHOR (or representitive)
1. The Great Fire of London 1666
2. Escape from the Aliens
3. The Resistance

GAMES A LOT OF PEOPLE WERE PLAYING/BUYING THAT LOOKED INTERESTING
1. 7 Wonders
2. Die Tore der Welt
3. Die Verbotene Insel
4. Linie 1
5. Tobago
6. Jack's Gold
7. Dixit
8. Black Friday
9. Loch Ness
10. Safranito

GAMES THAT SOLD OUT BEFORE WE COULD CHECK THEM OUT
1. The King Commands
2. Hellas: Peloponnes



PURCHASES
4. GEISTESBLITZ
Possibly the best games I've ever played...? And just 9 euros.
This is for 2-8 players. It's so much fun. Most importantly it would make a most amazing drinking game. Perfect for gaming weekends. It's quite tricky to describe without the bits, but there are 5 wooden objects in the middle. You have to draw a card and you have to grab the correct object first. However there are +vee and -ve cards. +ve cards require you grab the depicted picture (but it has been designed so this is not as easy as it sounds). -ve cards show 2 of the 5 objects in the wrong colour (the colours corresponding to the other object) leaving only one object that is not depicted (i.e. the one to grab). It's a total head-fudge. And then it gets really good, when you can introduce new rules in later rounds. There's also punishments for making a mistake (which could also incorportae a shot of Jaeger or something!). I think it's better than how I've described it!

PLAYED
1. WINGS OF WAR
This will probably be my next major purchase. I would have bought it but it was too big for my suitcase. Essentially you are areoplanes dogfighting (there are lots of missions when you get board of that). You all select your go at the same time and reveal at the same time, so there's a good amount of skill. To move the planes, you have a deck of card with movements on them which you pre-select. Then when everyone reveals, you put the card under your plane and follow the arrow on it. When everyone's done that, there's a special ruler to determine if anyone is in range of your guns. The only downside is that damage is determined by drawing tokens out of a bag at random. So I was shot down in seconds! We played the WW2 verson, but there's a WW1 version with slightly different rules whcih I prefered the look of. Also the good thing is that the manoeuvure and fire power of the planes is different to try and reflect historical accuracy.

3. TIKAL II
It's a bit like being Indiana Jones, but really really boring. I won't be buying this and so can't be arsed to explain it. Look it up on BGG if you're interested!

6. MR JACK (POCKET)
So there was a Mr Jack game and then the Pocket version. They're both only 2 player, so we played the pocket version thinking it could potentially be a good game for holidays, etc. I really liked it, but we didn't buy it as we questioned its longevity and it was expensive at 15euros (and it was just a few cards/tiles).

It's a clever mechanic. One of you plays Holmes, Watson and his dog, the other plays Jack the Ripper. If you are Mr Jack, you (conveniently) disguise yourself as one of 9 people. The detective then has to try and work out which person you're disguised as. If they do they win. Mr Jack has to try and prevent this by wasting the detective's time. If they manage this, Mr Jack wins.

The game has 9 tiles each with a different suspect on and some street. Watson, Holmes and the dog a smaller tokens which move around the outside of this 9 tiles. Each tile has a bit of wall on it. So all the tiles and tokens can be moved based on some available actions. The idea of Mr Jack is to make it so the detective can only see wall, and not people. The detective wants to be able to look down the streets and see people. One nice thing about this game is that on a turn, each player has 2 actions. On turns 1, 3, 5, etc, the detective does an action, then Mr Jack does 2 actions, then the dective a last action. It's the otherway around for turns 2, 4, 6 etc. It's a quick game too. Took about 15mins. And the box it came in was very small (pocket sized - almost!).




Here's a Picture of Klaus Teuber signing stuff. What a gent!



















And here's a picture of a stall selling little game pieces.




Anyways, there's clearly a lot to write about. Therefore I thought if there's anything from the list you want to know more about, then please suggest it on the comments feed. Most popular one(s) gets a bit of a write up.

You can see my youtube video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ky1mg9fwM

It's just the video clips I took stuck together, but hopefully it'll give you an idea of the event. I was going to do a proper video blog, but that fell by the way-side. If you want me to video blog any of the games we bought (a la Tom Vassel), then just say!

Finally, we ate here on our last night:

Gaming Weekend - Ryton - 8th to10th October 2010

A brief outline of the weekend with some videos.

Friday night, we gamed from 8pm to 5.30am.

Saturday, we went to the pub and played Perudo and Citadels from about noon til about 6pm. At the pub I discovered 3 delicious ales: Caledonian Autumn Red and 2 from Beartown brewery (Ginger Bear and Peach Melbear).

Saturday night was pizza and poker night. And we played perudo and citdals. And probably something else.

Sunday I went home. Monday I felt ill. Probably because from 8pm Friday to about 2am Sunday morning, there was only about a 6 hour period when we weren't drinking beer.

ah, bliss....

The Videos
1. A short clip of Powergrid (just because it's a beautiful game).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=61SZE4MnN9w

2. The Agricola epic
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImHu0Ll_71U

3. Poker side game
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvYn03LT2J4

Bioterroirsm rules ok

So, I have seen the bioterrorist attempt to sabotage the well-meaning efforts of others in their attempt to curb the pandemic.

Bioterrorist: you must attempt to spread a fifth disease and sabotage research stations. Your moves are secret. And frequent. Be careful not to be caught, and be ultra careful not to allow your uber-disease to be erradicated. If so, you will have to put the kettle on.

Enjoy!

Bandu

Here is something original indeed. And 80's. And sadly out of print. My life quest is to find a second-hand copy.

It's an American game (apparently). You have to build a tower, and of course make it as structurally sound as possible. When your tower falls, your out. So the winner is the person whose tower has yet to topple. You have to build your tower on a block of wood about the same size as a Jenga piece. THe pieces with which to build the tower are odd shapes that ma be slanted or curved. Many of them are based on real-life objects, such as a cotton reel, egg, egg cup, small bowling pin, etc.

Here's where it gets good: everyone starts with 5 beans. On your turn you have 2 options. You pick a piece which you can either "bid to accept" or "bid to reject". If you "bid to accept" the person your left decides if they want it. If so, they bid 1 bean. then it goes round the circle while people either increase their bid or don' want to get involved in bidding. Remember you only have 5 beans for the entire game. If no one bids any beens, you get it for free!

If you decide instead to pick a piece and "bid to reject", the person to your left has 2 choices: either accept the piece and place it on/into their tower or pay one bean to reject it. If they pay the 1 bean, it goes to the next person who has the same options. If it comes all the way back round to you, the cost to reject goes up to 2 beans and so it continues.

Got it? Hope that's clear. My oh my, was there tension, laughter, sqwuarking and at times utter dispair. We had more people than could play (max players is 6), so 2 people just watched. And they had a great time too!

The oddly shaped pieces often fit surprisingly well together, but it is no way an easy game. The numerous pieces and the different ways they can be placed ensures longevity. I doubt 2 identicle towers have ever been built. Sometimes, people were overcome with the aesthetics of a tower.

I beg of you all to seek this game out and buy it. It's not available in UK on ebay. It is in USA, but P+P to UK is extortionate. Is it available in NZ or Australia.

Apparently there is a very similar game called Bausack. Bausack is also unavailable in the UK. Happy searching potential fellow Bandu-lovers!

Slowballs, do you own intrigue?

The news is out...

http://drakesflames.blogspot.com/2010/01/card-game-review-dominion-intrigue.html

Future Gaming

So the reason I haven't been posting recentlyis here. I have made the initial small outlay of buying an Ipad and now have to finance my way through several thousand apps. Apps which prove to be bigger, brighter and pack more features than can be found on the ipod/phone. Theres been a great Catan port to the ipod touch, which makes the most of the lack of screen real-estate, which has yet to be realized on the Ipad. But there have been releases of an picture perfect ‘Small World’ app, Carcassonne has made it in a slightly different guise under the bizarre title of ‘Might and Card Golden’, as well as many of the classics such as Scrabble, Chess and the like.

Of course the ipad will never replace the games themselves, it just cant compare to the physical presence of the original. But I did try playing Pandemic on a busy train across NZ once and needless to say it didn't really get off the ground. The Ipad offers portability, ever increasing choice and style. I can now fully hope to play a game of Small world or Carcassonne on a plane, I don't even have to decide which ones to take with me! The pad offers some inventive features I haven't seen realized with playing the same versions on your laptop. Scrabble and poker both have support for wireless/bluetooth connections to Iphone/pads so you can play on a central game board with your tiles hidden in your hand. Im looking forward to the day I can hide my resource and development cards in my phone over a game of Cities and Knights.

Despite all these options however the app I’ve used far more than any other has been SmartGo Kifu. Go is like no other board game, entirely abstract, its been described as where chess is like a battle, go is a war. The rules are simple, to surround as much territory as possible but the outcomes from playing on a 19x19 board are near infinite. To become confident at this board game requires training and not only does SmartGo give you a good computer opponent player to play against (easier said than done in a game that relies mostly on abstract pattern recognition and is rooted in philosophies of strength and weakness) but it also gives you tutorials, problems and past games to review and learn from.

Perhaps this is where the true greatness of an amalgamation of board games and computer games lie. Battling the rule book of Agricola was a right of passage for me, but inevitably our first few games were full of mistakes, illegal moves, and slow, slow progress. We all appreciate being taught a new game, why not let that teacher be your Ipad?

Black Market deck for Dominion

This seedy man in a dark alley allows you to potentially purchase any other card in the game which you're not playing with. You make a deck of cards from all the unused kingdom cards (one of each). When you play this, you draw the top 3 blindly and have the opportunity to purchase one. Of course there are only a small number of cards that people want (e.g. the witch), but BM's well worth having as he costs just 3 coins, but gives you 2 coins to spend when he's played.

Tasty little card. Feels nice to have him snuggled in my box!

FotM

Farmer's of the Moor! Agricola's expansion. Because there's not enough going on with Agricola already!

So you start with woodland and pete bogs on your farm. During the harvest phase you need fuel as well as food now. The clever thing is, that you need less fuel if you've upgraded to a clay house, and even less for a stone house.

Not enough fuel? Your people get ill. Then they have to waste a turn going to the infirmary to get better.

My favourite bit to the new expansion: there are special cards which will help you get fuel, food etc. You can choose to pick one of these instead of sending a dude out to do an errand. You still get to send all your dudes out, so they're like extra goes. But the clever bit is you can do it any order, so it add in another stressful decision. Therefore if you don't play wisely, your opponent may get 4 goes to your 2 in the early stages. Wow.

Second favourite bit: Horses! Why? Cos they're not wooden blocks, but actual wooden horses. Yay! or should that be Naaaay!

What else? Loads of new minor improvements. One of them gives you 2 extra bits of farm space. And new major improvements. My favourite minor imporvement so far is the Bog Body. A well preserved dead body in your peat bog whcih you can donate to the museum (a major imporvement). I think this expansion will be much better with 4 or 5 players, as then the opportunity to really utilise the new major improvements will be realised.

Final word: the photo in this article is a FotM horse visiting the infirmary. Das Pferd besucht der Krankenhaus! Uber toll!

Citadels

While we're on a theme of card games where you can choose roles, I need to tell you about Citadels. I played this at the March 2010 gaming weekend.

I loved this game. The idea is, is to build a city. When someone has 8 "buildings" (i.e. 8 cards), the game ends. Each building is worth different victory points, and there are some bonus points avialble too.

The great thing about this game is that at the beginning of each round, everyone chooses a character (or 2 characters in a 2 player game), and they all play in a set order. The characters are chosen in secret. The first character to play is the assassin. He names another character; if someone has chosen that character, then they are out for this round! Sometimes the assassin chooses a character that no has picked. Then it's the thief's turn and so on. There are 8 character cards to choose; and the game can be played with up to 7 players (which I think is really fantastic).

So the best bit of the game is over. The rest of the mechanic is fairly simple and designed to allow accumulation of points. You can choose to either aquire new buildings in your hand or get some coins (lovely gold coins that come with the game). Then you can pay for a building in your hand. There are different coloured buildings that have significance and some have extra joy to be had from them too.

A very quick game. One I really enjoyed playing in the pub.

I'm beginning to develop a love affair with card games, because they can be so simple, versatile and compelling. Excepting the artwork they just lack that physical asthetic which is often important in a game.

I'm looking forward to playing Race to the Galaxy. I've heard good thigns about it and have always fancied trying it.

Another game i've heard of which is supposed to be simialr to Citadels is A Fist Full of Dragon Stones (or something with a similar title). That's supposed to have a good bidding system (instead of simply choosing) whereby any money you bid, you lose, regardless of if you win the bid or not (I could be getting that mixed up with another game though!!).

Race for the Galaxy

I'm pretty excited about this game. I've only played it twice and I can see it's going to be a favorite.

When I initially read the rules I was disappointed: I thought "this is Puerto Rico and San Juan". It described a game played over multiple rounds where you each choose whether to "Explore, Develop, Settle, Trade, Consume or Produce", sound familiar? It did to me.

One initial difference was obvious: It's not a board-game (no board!). Just a set of cards and a few (unimpressive) VP chips, hardly worthy of a box. One neat thing about this set of cards though is that you shuffle (almost) all of them together and then just play. The cards themselves have some nice artwork and funky titles "Terraforming Robot" and when you play the game you lay them in front of you to form your corner of the universe, thereby producing an end product which has more of a board-game feel to it than, say, Dominion.

Another difference is that you can all take on the same roll and gain it's bonus, but only actions chosen by players take place in that round, so if everyone chooses to Explore then you all do it and progress straight to the next round.

So, it doesn't "Feel" like Rico or San Juan but it's strengths are similar: "Should I produce now when it will help others more than me?" "Should I save this card until I can afford to play it or should I discard it to pay for another card?" (cards are used as currency, as in San Juan) "Do I place a final card to end the game or try and get more VPs first?".

A nice level of strategy. Not quite as "pure" as Rico since you're reliant on a shuffled deck of cards which, to a certain extent, influence the choices you make. But a good deal more strategy than San Juan or Dominion.

An excellent game, and easy to travel with - maybe for a ski trip?!

Lost Cities - Pub Rules

So I came across a board game shop while in London and bought this game on Slowball's recommendation. My firend and I went straight to the pub to play it. But oh no! You need pen and paper to keep track of the score as the rounds progress.

Pub Rules: just one round. Makes adding up in your head easier.

And btw: is Lost Cities more stressful than trying to feed your family in Agricola? Argh, when you invest and then don't draw the cards... and then if you leave it to late to even do a bit of damage limitation... arrrgh.

Tom V

Yes, he is a guiding light. Almost a greater authority than BGG. But not quite. I was interested to see that Peurto Rico for him is 101st (or was it 100th?).

However Tom does LoVe Ticket to Ride; which although has a simple charm, I'm really not that taken with it. Maybe I need to play it more, and with more people.

Quite rightly he loves Dominion. That's fine.

The best thing about Tom V's top 200 is the way he chose them. That seemed like an exciting game in itself!

Lost Cities - the card game

A number of good points were raised there in the Alhambra post, notably the fact that sometime you just want a game that will be quick and fun, and here's one such game.

I would not have come across this if not for the big Tom V, he rated this simple card game at a whopping No 14, much higher than its BGG rank of 143.

And why does he like it so much? Simple, it's very fast, easy for everyone to learn but with a surprising amount of strategy.

The aim of this 2-player game is to try and place cards to get you to one (or more) of five lost cities. You decide how many lost cities you want to attempt to find, however, there's a cost to each mission so if you over-stretch yourself you can get minus points.

If feels similar to Balloon Cup in that you only have two real decisions to make: Either you place a card on your side of the board to try and gain points by getting to a lost city, or you discard the card to the middle. The skill comes from furthering your own expeditions without helping your opponent (by giving them cards they might need).

It takes maybe five minutes per hand and you play the best of three. It's so simple but very addictive and whilst there's a certain amount of luck in which cards you draw, there's definite skill involved too.

Highly reccomended.

And here's me losing a game: but not to Jo, she can't beat me (much to her frustration!)

Alhambra

Game of the Year at the Essen games fair 2003, yet 184th on the BGG website. There's a reason for this: it's a wonderfuly designed game with regards asthetics and mechanics, but lacks depth of strategy and perhaps relies a little too much on luck.

So when am I going to play this then? There are 3 senarios:

1. When I'm tired and I don't want to tax my brain too much.
2. If I want to introduce someone to Euro-games.
3. If I want a game that I can play in under an hour.

It's surprising how often the above 3 senarios are common. Therefore it deserves a place on any gamers bookcase (or should that be gamecase?).

A little about the game itself:
you need to build a palace. You each start with a fountain and buy bits to your palace which you expand. Cleverly, the pieces of palace have varying amounts of wall around them, making it challenging to fit into your own palace (and often impossible). There are always 4 different things to buy, each with its own currency. When they are bought, something new replaces it at random.

There are 3 stages when scoring. The scoring system is very beautiful. In stage 1, points only go to the players with the most pieces of a certain type (e.g. if I have 3 gardens and my opponents have 1 each, I get the points). In round 2 the people with the second most will now also get some points and in round 3 the people with the 3rdmost get points too.

That's it! And of course most points wins.

In summary:
A tidy little game, that's swift on time and gentle on cognition. It lacks depth though, which strategy and luck-elimination junkies will get frustrated by. But then even marathon runners enjoy a gentle strole through a park, right?

My favourite 2 player Dominion.

Moat, Chapel, Village, Throne Room, Thief, Bureaucrat, Market, Witch, Mine, Festival. And ALL the curse cards!

I love the combination of the big money potentials, using the Bureaucrat and Mine combined with the Market and Festival, all doubled up with the Throne Room multiplier. Big money allows for plenty of attack cards and plenty of Thieving, and playing will all the curse cards ensures the Witch stays a constant threat, not just due to the negative victory points, but also due to the secondary hand dilution which is often more devastating. A Chapel is required if you’re going to compete in this sort of environment to remove all the curse and copper cards, and of course the Moat for some sort of defense. Villages and Festivals allow for long hand combos to allow you to get through the massive deck, for one hell of a big game!

Alternative Pandemic rolls #1 - The Prostitute

The Prostitute - Plays against the other roles, much the same as the Bioterrorist in the expansion pack. Instead of infecting areas, however, should the disease ridden Prostitute arrive in the same area as one of the other roles they become infected and carry round a cube until cured by another role. Should The role infected by the prostitute pass through a city on the verge of outbreaking, the extra cube would cause an outbreak. Of course the Prostitute can also work with the Bioterrorist, infecting him and using his body as the ultimate way to spread disease, however the accelerated disease process would only give him 3 turns to live.

Twilight Struggle

I totally agree with sam's insightful post on Dominion there and it made me think about Twilight Struggle.

Here's a well considered game and a well constructed one (both in the planning and in the quality that GMT games have produced). It bears a passing resemblance to other territory acquiring games such as Risk but in it's detail and it's commitment to a theme it goes way beyond.

From what I've been reading, this is a game which has been around for some time but which was little-known until recently when a few geeks descovered it and elevated it to the lofty rank of third in the Boardgame Geek top games list, it's since been re-issued and has been bought by a new generation of gamers, and here's one - me.

To give you a flavor of what the game's about I'll briefly describe how it's played (this could be tough!): It's a 2-player game, one plays the US and the other plays the USSR. It's played over ten rounds and each represents a four or five year portion of the 45 year war. During the game you will try to gain influence and control across the globe, but particularly in key battleground states such as Korea and Germany. The flavour and detail in the game come from three decks of cards (representing the early, middle and late war) which all contain key elements of the war (Cuban Missile Crisis, Korean War, Pershing 2 Deployment). During each round you will have eight cards to play and you take turns in placing them. Some cards can only benefit either the USSR or the US, some can benefit both and part of the skill in the game comes from minimizing any benefit you are forced to give your opponent. Each card contains an action and a value (from 0 to 4 or 5) and you can choose to use the action or to use the value to perform military operations around the board. Scoring comes from a number of areas but mainly from scoring cards such as the Europe Scoring Card: This will be randomly picked-up by one player and will be played at their discression during that round. You score points as detailed on the card, this typically involves the player with the most influence in that area scoring highest. The game ends as soon as one player moves 20 points ahead of the other, at the end of turn 10 or if ever you trigger a nuclear war by decreasing DEFCON to level 1.

So, when I first purchased the game I was, of course, eager to get playing. I took it home, unwrapped it and started to read the rule-book. This was a 40-page document but, somehow, devoted very few of these to explaining how to play, and I found it tough trying to understand what the game was all about, what we were aiming at or what was the point of doing the many things it said were possible. As such, I gave-up and quit after two-hours of trying to fathom it. I took the rules to bed later that day and a few days on I felt we could attempt our first game: We did, we started to play, we seemed to be getting things mainly right and the game progressed (very slowly) but we still didn't really know where to concentrate our efforts so a couple of hours into the game we gave-up (again). However, that was not a fruitless game, it set us up for our first (and so far our last!) full game which we completed in just shy of 4 hours and which I'm pleased to say I won.

So, is it good? Is it worth the effort? Will I play again?

Yes. I hope that when I gave you the brief run-down of the gameplay you started to get a feel for why you would play this game, it has everything that Sam felt was lacking in Dominion: A World-map for a board, a thoroughly cohesive theme where you really do feel like you're slogging your way through a bitter and protracted war, a low complexity scoring system where you can always see who's winning, dogs in space and the ever-present nuclear threat! It really is awesome in the truest sense of the word.

So, should you all rush out and buy it? No, absolutely not, if only for the reason that no other person should have to endure trying to learn this game by themselves! I really feel like the manufacturers intended that you would learn this game with someone who's played it before, the rules just don't compare to those provided in more modern games (they make the Puerto Rico rules like an early-learning pamphlet!). This is a long game, it was not just our inexperience which took it to the many-hour level of gaming, it simply has so many elements and such a lot of decisions that you could never play it quickly. It's also a 2-player game and could never be played with more.

Tom Vassel likes this game and says that every year he moves it higher up his list of favourite games. This makes perfect sense to me: It is one of those games which you start playing with very poor (or no) strategy and which I think would take a number of games before you could put together anything but a rudimentary strategy. In particular, it's hard not to solely concentrate on what is happening right now in your first game, but what you clearly need to have present in your mind at all times is the Middle and Late stages of the war (where different cards come into play and where your early moves could become very important). As such, this is a game which could take a lifetime to become any good at, and you'd need someone else who's going to put in the hours because you could never have a mismatched pairing.

In summary then, this will never be a game which you play regularly (for many it will be a game you'll never want to even try) but for those who like a well themed game, high on strategy and with the intensity you get from a one-on-one battle, there can be few (if any) better.

Dominion

I have to say I do love Dominion for many of the reasons below, but it can never be perfect. Stating the obvious its a card based game, devoted to expanding a kingdom. Sadly you get no visual feel for the kingdom youre set to grow except for the tactile weight of more cards in your hand. Theres no sitting back and surveying your kingdom, indeed theres no way of even determining from two decks who has a kingdom of coppers and poor houses and who has a deck of gold and provinces. Counter intuitively as you become more experienced at the game it pays to have a more streamlined deck so that the better cards have an increased frequency of showing up and therefore deck size has even less to do with progress in the game. This of course makes for an interesting game where it can be easy to loose track of who is winning and keeps everyone guessing till the end, however in a game which advertises ‘uniting people under your banner’ you get very little sense of progress through the game.

Its probably the best card based game ive played, but it will never beat truly board based games. If im growing a kingdom, I want to be able to sit back and see grow! (Read: see it be better than yours).

Dominion - ctd

Another couple of reasons why Dominion's great (having just played a couple of games): We all get so pissed off when we're losing and when we find out we've lost. (Because you know you've played badly, you can't blame luck.) We also find it hard to work out who's winning through the game and usually feel like we're losing even if we're winning, so most of the time we're pretty grumpy when playing! Probably not everyone would consider this good but I think a great game should have the power to change your emotions. And essentially that's where I struggle with co-op games like Pandemic, I just don't care if "we" beat the game, I don't feel anything.

Dominion

Pretty much had to start here: This is easily my favorite game of the past year and one which I feel starts from a unique point. Sure, it has similarities with other games in that you're trying to collect victory points whilst balancing this with the need for money (treasure) and bonus cards (kingdom cards). This reminds me most of Puerto Rico (which I see has returned to the no.1 spot on BGG). But the whole concept behind building your own deck of cards and trying to get the right cards at he right time seems, to me, to be a pretty new one.

It's a game which has clearly been meticulously planned. I sometimes felt in my early games that the cost of some cards was not quite right but having played many times I see that I was wrong and if a card costs 5 then it's worth 5. I also couldn't understand why there were so many curse cards until recently we played a 4-player game and all the cards were used-up by halfway through.

Some of the best features of the game are: It's speed, most games over in less than half an hour for 2 players and 45mins for 4. The fact that it plays so well as a 2 player game and you have to change your thinking a little when there's more players involved. Its super-easy to learn and to teach, it's also a good game to introduce non-gamers to because it's so fast. And, of course, the enormous variability in the game, particularly if you look at the expansions too.

Any bad points? Well, in the same way that in Power Grid sometimes somebody gets an amazing power plant early-on and gains a big advantage from that, there have been occasions when one player gets cards which are "too good" at the start: I can think of two scenarios where this has happened, both in 2-player games: One is where on a player's first go they produce 5 bronze cards (having shuffled poorly?) and are able to buy a Witch, the opponent gets cursed to buggery multiple times in the opening rounds and is unable to recover. The other is where you acquire a lot of gold early on, can't quite remember how it happened but it made for a one-sided game.

But on the whole, Dominion is a near-flawless game and one which should be owned by everyone in the land - 5 stars!

The big gap

So, I've got much to blog about but I thought I'd best start with a quick run-down of why there's been such a long gap since our last posts. Basically this is due to a number of factors: Mainly laziness it has to be said, but also the fact that we've all changed jobs and moved house - some of us going a little further than others ;) . On the plus side, we've all kept gaming and through our changed circumstances we've hopefully got more to talk about so let's go...