30th April 2025
Lots of gamers ready and willing to play lots of games this session, from making quilts for cats to vegetable futures!
One table started off with a quick game of High Society, which is a game about owning the best stuff to show it off to others, but beware, if you end up with the least money at the end, you will be declared poor and ostracised - (is this better than being thrown to the crocodiles like in Cleopatra?). Anyway, each aristocrat starts with a hand of money in large to small denominations, and you bid on the cards drawn - numbered from 10 - most desirable - down to 1. You can’t change the money you have bid, so you have to be careful how to bid and not be left with just the large denominations. There are 4 special cards in the pack and when the last of these are drawn the game ends and the highest in society (with the largest collection of numbers) wins. This ended up being very one sided as only one person - Janek - managed to get and keep some items even though they were worth half points - so won the game!
After that it was time to create a Patchwork Doodle with 6 players, first played back in November 2022, it was a fun game for all, but there was a clear patchwork champion - a brand new player to the club - Hallie H.
Next the table tried Vegetable Stock, which is a game of playing the vegetable stock market - hence the pun! Each round you get to choose to take one of the veggie combos on a card - like 2 carrots and a broccoli - and after every player has taken one, the card left adjusts the stock price of the vegetables shown. If a veg’s price goes beyond 5, its price crashes and goes to zero! So this is a game about trying to collect the veg that will be worth the most at the end, though others may try and tank your veg price! Its a fun little game and in the end, the only veg that didn’t get to 5 was the egg plant, so there was a lot of high scoring vegetables, but again Hallie had collected wisely and went home with all the trimmings!
On a different table, they got stuck into Calico a game about making quilts and encouraging cats to sit on them. Everyone starts with an identical quilt board and drafts three personal objectives that are hexagonal tiles that go on specific places in the board. They require the six spots around the objective to be filled with the hexagonal quilt tiles with certain colour and/or pattern combinations, like four of one type and two others or all different. If at the end of the game you manage this you score points for either colours or patterns or more points if you managed both colours and patterns matching the goal rule. You can also score by building zones of the same colour and you can include the tiles that make up the edge of the board, scoring zones of three or more are denoted by buttons and if you manage to collect all six colours of buttons you can also claim a rainbow button. Finally the cats, these have pattern preferences, three cats and their preferred patterns are randomly drawn at the start of the game, the cats prefer zones of increasingly larger numbers of adjacent tiles with the same pattern but sometimes specific layouts.
Everyone starts the game with two random quilt hexagon tiles and you must place a tile from your hand into your quilt board and then draft a replacement tile from a choice of three and then the draft pool is randomly replaced from the bag. Early on you have lots of options to place tiles but as the game progresses and the quilt fills up and you are locked into your scoring strategy for the personal goals the draft choice becomes more critical. First time player Kathy just pipped teacher Terence for the title of master quilter with all three goal tiles scoring the lower score and a three cat rainbow button quilt, whilst Terence had managed a high scoring colour and pattern goal. A relatively simple game mechanic but some good strategic thinking to maximise your scoring options, varied gameplay with the changeable goals and some tense moments seeing what the draw pool options would be and if a coveted tile would still be there when your next turn came round.
The big games for the night were all replays, though some with different expansions enabled: Dune: Imperium, On Mars and Galactic Cruise. See the previous 49th, 95th and 98th blog posts respectively to find out more about the games!
Bus was back for another go, this time with just three players - Simon, Richie and Jeremy. Only Jeremy hadn’t played the time travelling bus game before, but after a quick set of instructions, he jumped in to try and figure out exactly what strategies might work.
Simon and Richie were battling over bus routes whilst Jeremy for most of the game just kept ferrying the same passengers back and forth and used a blocking strategy - stopping other pesky players from messing with the time travel. So in the end Jeremy managed to just edge ahead in the scores and keep ahead of the others to claim the win.
Forest Shuffle was back at the club tables with two veteran players and two newbies. After a quick teach the forests were soon being planted and populated with other plants and animals. James went for a risky strategy trying to collect all eight tree types, but so was Kathy so there was some competition for the rarer tree types. Meanwhile David had gone heavy on the European hares and Annalee was planting lots of Horse chestnuts for that multiplier bonus with a side helping of some complimentary deer. When the third winter card was revealed ending the game, both James and Kathy had managed their tree collections and Kathy had added in a nice butterfly and hedgehog combo but James had added more of the tree type with a multiplier for collecting all the trees and 2 sets of wild strawberries for a similar effect leading to a big score from just his trees. This gave James a good lead but Kathy and Annalee broke the one hundred point barrier and everyone was happy with their flourishing woodlands.
After some time in the forest and transporting passengers, the tables merged together for a bit of gunslinging - BANG! The Dice Game. This is a hidden roles game where the only person whose role is known is the Sheriff and their job, with the help of unknown deputies, is to root out and kill the outlaws, whilst the renegade sits on the side lines and hopes to be the last standing. Its a bit of dice rolling fun where you slowly piece together who’s who, hopefully before being knocked out of the game! The first game saw the Outlaws win - Annalee and Jeremy - defeating Richie the Sheriff with the help of the Indians arrows (and partly because he forgot to start with 2 extra hit points!). It is a quick game, so 2 more rounds were played, the third culminating in a nail biting stand off between 2 outlaws and the sheriff and deputy, but the Sheriff (Richie again) succumbed to the fast shooting of Kathy the Outlaw.
Ebbes (now republished as Hund - which is the name it has on BGA) is a trick taking game, the twist being there are 5 suits and you don’t know which will be trumps and how each suit will score until partway through each round. These conditions get set each round when the first card of a randomly chosen value at round start is played for each suit. Played over five rounds the overall scores had separated quite a lot as some players got negative scores for collecting too many of what turned out to be the wrong suit. A simple teach for those familiar with similar games and a easy way to finish a busy night off.
The next session is May 14th, join us for another evening with multiple games to suit all tastes on offer. If you join the Discord channel there may be some pre session chat suggesting games to bring and asking for players.
- Total Session Attendance: 18
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Board Games: