26th November 2025
12 players joined us for an evening of adventuring to finish off the gaming year.
Cryptid was back for a fourth club play, last seen in session 75. Four players were searching the landscape hexes for the cryptid monster armed with only a few vague but unique secret clues. Then by asking each other questions and placing markers on the map you can narrow down to the one location where the cryptid is. Most players had worked out what a few of their competitors knew, for example within 3 hexes of a white object, in a mountain or a desert or near an animal territory. Several players guessed in the right area, but it was Graham that managed to find the unique hex first, with a lucky guess.
Ticket to Ride: Paris is a shorter version of the train classic was on its second club play, last seen in session 76. It was Steph teaching Elliot (a new player), with Darren and Jeremy also up for a game. Its a quick game with only 5 colours of tram-buses (instead of carriages), with a way of getting extra points by doing the red, white and blue routes. At the end of the game, everyone managed their tickets (routes) they had, but Steph had also managed to put down the most tram-buses which caused the last round and put her in the winning seat after all the counting was done.
Then it was time to move onto the longer games.
Lost Ruins of Arnak Adventure Chest had a second outing at club this time with the other new Owl temple board selected, original Arnak has graced the club tables 7 times before. Three adventurers chose their roles (Falconer, Mystic and Captain) and set off exploring the lost island and trying to acquire enough resources to work their way up the research track as that is the main focus of this board. The research track allows you to sideline your magnifying glass into a side passage locking in some victory points but then you have to work a new marker, the lantern, up the track as well. There are also half idol token slot jigsaw pieces to collect that bring in victory points and when completed allow an idol to be used with no victory point penalty unlike the slots on the player board. Each player had a slightly different tactic, Richie was racing up the research track and did make it to the top. Natasha was collecting the idol jigsaw pieces for a nice end game points score and Kathy tried a more balanced approach with exploration, guardian taming, research and idol slot pieces. The result was very close with 76, 80 and 84 final points, Natasha had scored the most points but then had a -8 penalty from fear cards making her second, while Richie’s mystic had used all his fear in rituals and claimed the win.
Kathy and Richie then had a couple of games of Kingdomino to finish the evening. This has now been played at seventeen separate club sessions, but is still not rivalling Ecosystem with its 30 session dominance.
After playing some shorter games, Jeremy, Steph, Dave and Daren settled in for an adventure in Stonemaier Games’ new open world epic, Vantage. Eight years in the making, this seems somewhat of a passion project for Stonemaier’s co-founder Jamie Stegmeier and contains a huge deck of 800 locations and 900 further items and activities to discover. Each play session is a self-contained adventure which makes it much easier to get to the table, as you don’t need to get the same group together for a lengthy campaign or worry about saving progress along the way. The story goes that you and your fellow players are on a spaceship that crashes on an uncharted planet. As a result of the crash all the crew members are separated and end up in different locations. Each player is then free to go off on their own adventure, including picking up side-quests, but always with an eye on the randomly chosen group mission. Players start off looking at a location card that is illustrated from a first-person perspective. They can discuss what is on their card and what they should do, but each card must not be shown to anyone else. When choosing a move action, you pick a numbered direction and then draw the corresponding card from the deck.
This game is very much about the journey rather than the destination and each location provides six possible actions that can be taken: move, look, engage, overpower, help and take. After choosing an action, a short passage is read from one of the seven story books, followed by a skill test. This skill test involves rolling a set number of dice and then trying to place any unwanted rolls on corresponding card spots. The character you choose at the start specialises in a particular type of action and so will find it easier to mitigate bad rolls when completing that action type. Jeremy chose Tina the Marine(a) who likes to hit things, Steph chose Jules the captain, specialising in moving (and taking things that don’t belong to them), Dave chose Emilien the scholar, who likes to engage with the locals in the name of research and Darren chose Soren, the thoughtful and methodical navigator. This is very much a cooperative game, and you need to work together to mitigate those bad rolls, offering up skill tokens to reduce the number of dice or providing spaces on your card tableau. Fortunately, you can’t really fail a skill test, though failure to place those bad dice could result in one of your key stats being lowered (time, health or morale). Even fully depleting one of these stats is not necessarily the end, as the game gives you one more chance to keep questing.
The group mission randomly drawn at the start sets the all-important win condition, as well as giving a bit of initial direction. Our mission was all about diplomacy and gaining favour with one of the in-game factions. As the priority was clearly about the subtle art of making friends and influencing people, Jeremy (Tina the Marine) quickly equipped an axe and went about trying to “cleave” everything in sight. Steph tried to win over the local population by stealing whatever wasn’t nailed down and ended up going deep into a cave system, eventually riding a giant centipede back to the surface. Dave started off with good intentions trying to glean knowledge of some mysterious glyphs from the locals before ending up embarking on an epic side-quest to find 9 different symbols. Alas his attention quickly wandered and after talking his way into a local dwelling, he stole a rather unsubtle weapon, proving that although the pen is undoubtedly mightier than the sword, nothing is mightier than a giant skull hammer. Luckily, Darren at least was paying attention to the mission and through taking a less antisocial approach than the others, gained an alien companion and ended up finding what proved to be the final challenge on the way towards ultimate (and perhaps ill-deserved) mission victory. The final challenge was a complex spatial and temporal puzzle involving moving lasers, but fortunately our plucky gang was up to the task. It was a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging adventure, and this game is sure to make a return to the club in the future.
Something rising from the past, a classic in the worker placement genre came back to the table Lords of Waterdeep (although it was last played in session 111, so not that long ago for the club this game hails from 2012). At its core, Lords of Water deep is a typical worker placement; you have a number of workers that activate spaces. The spaces generate resources to fulfil quests, allow you to draw more quests, or add/manipulate action spaces by adding new buildings. We played with the expansion Scoundrels of Skullport (one of those often cited examples of expansions that “fix” the base game), the expansion adds a new wrinkle to the game, corruption, with new buildings and new quests – adding that much needed variety and some interesting alternative plays. The question is, how can you do the most with the limited moves you have while avoiding being blocked out of important spaces.
The game was setup for four, but luckily a late arrival snuck in as a fifth player. It does not alter the game rules but adds more pressure for some action spots (as well as making the game run slightly longer – we were at the limit of the club’s session when the game actually finished).
There were some wild point jumps as early scoring was quickly surpassed by 20 and 40 point quests. Corruption was ever present and one player seemed to wallow in it… ultimately taking their final score to historic lows.
The game is sadly long out of print, mainly due to being licensed with the D&D Waterdeep theme… although, if that were taken away the underlying game setting is rather agnostic. It might be said that this is one place the game falls down; the “resources” are “adventurers (read cubes)” and the quests are akin to “contracts” in many similar games. You never get a sense that the many cubes are adventurers taming wild lands…
The next games session is the 7th January, as we have a short hiatus due to the festive period. Join in on Discord if you would like to see what options are being suggested for the next session, there may be some Christmas presents in need of some table time.
There will be a Club Meal at The Welcome Chinese Restaurant on 10th December. Contact us on Discord if you haven’t reserved a seat and would like to join and we can see if the booking can be extended.
- Total Session Attendance: 12
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Board Games: 6