24th July 2024
Seventeen gamers arrived this session for a room filling five table session with four new games and four returning games being played.
Three of the games had been pitched in advance on Discord and had most of their seats pre-booked. The session started with Steve L. setting up the many components for Nucleum while the rest of the early arrivers got stuck into Roll through the Ages and Tsuro.
Roll through the Ages: Bronze Age is a bit like Yahtzee, with dice rolling and locking in choices with the selected faces scoring points on a Bronze Age themed score pad.
Tsuro is a very simple tile placement game that scales to large player numbers so we had seven players trying to stay in the game the longest as the tiles extend the paths their counter is on, but if they meet another player or go off the edge of the play area they lose. See session 74 for a longer description.
Then the long games could start with people breaking away for Nucleum, Scythe and Crown of Ash. Leaving the remaining players surveying the offerings on the games table and selecting Maglev Metro and Pandemic.
What do you get if you cross Brass: Birmingham with Barrage? No, the answer isn’t Bra Rage in the as yet little-known West Midlands alpine region, but Nucleum, a medium/heavyish economic game which postulates an alternative history where the use of uranium as a power source was pioneered in 19th Century Saxony. Still with me?
From Barrage we have a power generation theme involving transporting natural resources to generators (here coal and uranium rather than water), neutral infrastructure on the map at the start helps with the early turns, contract fulfilment with some very helpful rewards and end of round scoring to name but a few. Ideas perhaps inspired by Brass: Birmingham include constructing level I-IV buildings from the player’s own board, which earn VPs when flipped (“energised” in the game), transport networks and fluctuating raw material prices. However, Nucleum also adds some neat twists of its own, such as the achievement stars earned when buildings are energised. These must be traded in when a player passes to gain income (a “recharge action”) and work as a multiplier in end game scoring. Player attributes are asymmetric, courtesy of the increasingly powerful technologies they may unlock on their player boards.
After two off-piste plays at the recent Manorcon, three of the four protagonists decided to give Nucleum its official club debut, with only Rich W missing from the original cast. Jyo K was aiming to maintain a winning run, while Steve L hoped to build on a respectable 2nd place last time out and maybe challenge Jyo for the win. While the only way was up for Iain D, he had digested a number of key takeaways from the two convention games (where some found the food perhaps not quite so easily digestible) and was raring to go. In Rich’s absence, would anyone step up to take the role of disruptor-in-chief, or would the players each concentrate on their own area of the map until the middle game brought them into close contact?
That question was answered soon enough as Jyo swiftly grabbed the second uranium mine space in a city Steve was already seeing as his patch and later followed up by placing an expensive government building in the last available spot in Praha, which had been Steve’s main focus. Elsewhere, Iain was rapidly urbanising NW Saxony and burning coal like it was going out of fashion to energise his fast- growing network, while Jyo also had time to consolidate her own set up in the NE by effectively sealing off access to other players.
In-game scoring ticked along nicely for two players, with Steve even briefly taking the lead from Jyo before she surged ahead. Although his bright red empire soon expanded to cover at least a third of the map, Iain had somehow managed to stay off the in-game scoring radar and lagged some way behind. That began to change though as play neared the end-game conditions and soon Steve could see Iain looming large in his rear-view mirror. While there was no catching Jyo for the win, final scoring (which plays out over multiple steps) was tense between these two, with Steve thinking he had done just enough to hold on to second place. However, it was not to be, and Iain eased past, having done more to capitalise on end-game bonuses while Steve was somewhat hamstrung by his early choices (and Jyo!) So, at least two of the players had something to be pleased about and (as Mr Loaf might have put it) two out of three ain’t bad. Unless you happen to be number three that is! All agreed it was a very enjoyable game with everyone achieving respectable scores and the prospect of more action to come, now that two copies of the Australia expansion have been purchased.
Four people sat down to play Scythe a strange mix of farming with mechs, wrapped inside a euro-style action selection game (with a little side dish of wargame/light combat). Each player takes a faction with a minor quirk, from which you build a path through various ways to score points, mostly from controlling areas on the board and getting stars. The stars are the end-game clock, achieving six of them triggers the final scoring (but that player doesn’t necessarily win); there are many possible stars to achieve for different things. There’s a sort of “king of the hill” mini-game happening on the board with a special space (the so-called factory) being a big prize to claim… but only if you can hold it. You can upgrade your actions, aiming to be as efficient as possible to get to the end when it is best for you. In play Scythe is not that complicated, each turn is small and easy to understand; chaining them together in the best way (while ignoring/annoying/avoiding the other players) is the problem you need to solve.
Crown of Ash is a game about necromancers, building mighty structures, raising armies, and warring between themselves to control those powerful sites. This was a new game introduced by Ian and Sophie to Graham and Jason who were willing to step into the shoes of a necromancer for a couple of hours.
Its a game played over 4 rounds and centres around these structures which earn you points of influence, so raising the best armies to both defend and take over these sites is the key to winning the Crown of Ash.
Three players got stuck into Maglev Metro the only train game of the night, but one with a futuristic levitating train setting with a nice mechanic where the tracks are on transparent hexes and can build up over the course of the game. We played the Manhattan map which starts with a three hex hub and then extends over rivers and around Central Park over the course of the game.
The game is all about efficient use of actions to develop your track network and collect robots and passengers and deliver them to their destinations. At first you can only collect robots and once delivered they are added to slots in your player board and start unlocking more actions and that is where the crucial choices begin. Do you increase the number of actions (start with two), increase the amount of track you can lay in an action, or how far your train can move, the capacity of the carriages, number of passengers that can be picked up or put down or use them to unlock the ability to build passenger stations and transport the four different colour passengers or put them in the victory point enhancing zones on the board, so many choices!
James T. got off to a fast start opening up the passenger section of his player board early while Darren C. and Kathy J. struggled to collect and deliver the right colour robots to do the same. After that there was no stopping James as he built up an efficient network for delivering purple and lilac passengers and covered most of his player board by the time the last passengers had been drawn from the bag signalling the final round. Kathy J. tried to catch up with a decent delivery of pink and coral passengers (that tied in nicely with her secret goal) and also by connecting up lots of stations (as completed links also bring in victory points) plus she just managed to fill in the multiplier for that on her board. Darren C. suffered from the teachers curse and got stuck at the bottom of the board with all the rivers and long distances to transport passengers to get them delivered and boost the options on his player board. It is a well designed game with nice components and now some of the dependencies on the player board are better understood from this introductory game it would be good to try and give James more of a challenge in a future game.
Three gamers decided to step into the shoes of CDC response specialists by playing Pandemic with Oliver W. taking on the role of lead Scientist - able to find cures with 1 less city data card, James T. (the younger) was an all round generalist - having 5 actions instead of 4, and Jeremy J. was a dispatcher - able to co-ordinate meetings by flying and ferrying players around the board to share information.
The random scenario started with us being based in Shanghai, where a major epidemic of the red virus was already in full swing in Asia. We started off well with the team gaining a cure for red quite quickly and keeping on top of things reasonably well, but then a double outbreak in South America, soon followed by one in Africa was the start of our troubles with the yellow virus in the global south. We carried on and managed to totally eradicate the virus in the west (where there had been little or no blue virus), and find a cure for yellow which allowed us to trigger a rapid vaccine deployment to get it better under control. Unfortunately two very close together new epidemics caused a cascade of outbreaks across the world ending in India which meant we lost the scenario as the viruses had got out of control.
We were not ready to call it quits, so tried again with the same specialists and same base in Shanghai. This time the random set up started with a similar major epidemic in Asia, but the rest was more evenly spread across the world. With some careful meet ups and lucky draws of city data, we managed to eradicate the red virus which gave us more breathing room when the virus spread or the epidemic hit an Asian city as we could ignore the outcome! With a very useful government grant to build another research station we soon had the yellow and blue viruses cured. It took a few turns to then pull together enough city data on the last virus, and though we got hit with another epidemic things were in much better control and so we triumphantly saved the world!
The session ended with the twenty fifth play of Ecosystem to finish the night after successfully saving the world whilst the other tables scored up.
The next session is the 7th of August, join us to see the many different games on offer, old and new, many themes and game mechanics. Contact us on the Discord forum if you want to suggest a game in advance, that can be very helpful if you want to try a long or complicated game so that it can get started early or players can watch a how to play video first.
- Total Session Attendance: 17
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Board Games: