18th March 2026
A good turnout trying one new game about Ants, a variant of a popular space themed game and four returning games.
The shortish starting game this session was King of New York. This was its second time out, last seen back in session 35. As it is a battle and elimination game although some players got knocked out early it took a little while to reach the final showdown with Neil emerging victorious.
Steph and Jyo were keen for a Kanban EV rematch and soon had 2 new recruits to this management in a car factory game. This was its fourth time on the tables, first played in session 86. There is a lot going on in the factory in order to design, build and test new electric cars and with 4 players competition for the prime factory locations was rife, not helped by the notorious Sandra from Management wandering around and taking up space with her clipboard and training audits. Despite following the teachers advice of not neglecting your training, Kathy was harshly marked down by Sandra and struggled to visit the design room, being new she had not realised how significant that room was and merrily generated parts and cars for everyone else. Between that and her enthusiastic input at the meetings she just about kept up with Steph and Jyo during the in game scoring. Natasha on the other hand was speeding all over the factory, avoiding Sandra and parking lots of upgraded cars in her garage. Steph and Jyo were playing more strategically to block each other scoring high, for example trying to stop Jyo building lots of top scoring black cars early on and they were jostling for second place all through the game.
But when the final scoring came and cars and upgrades in garages were counted, Natasha almost lapped everyone else (a lap of the score track is 100 points), Jyo just beat Steph, and Kathy fell behind having learned an important lesson that you need to master all the departments to thrive in the cut-throat world of car manufacture.
Four crafty merchants of the Hanseatic league met to prove their worth in Hansa Teutonica: Big Box which had been suggested by Iain on Discord. This is a classic cubes-on-a-map game, last played at the club back in session 99. Newbie Reynaldo joined veteran Iain alongside previous players Darren and James T to form trade routes, create networks and improve their skills.
Early moves were to claim the Quedlinburg-Gottingen route to gain an extra action, with Darren opting to build a trading house there in an effort to claim points from others looking for more actions (control of a trade house at either end of a route gains points whenever that route is claimed, routes are claimed multiple times throughout the game). James then started in on claiming corner towns to grab the point on each, and Iain started opening up his books to allow more movement of pieces, whilst also looking to start a network. Several towns had competition for control with a couple switching backing and forth with the aid of some hastily claimed bonus tiles, but James had remembered a Simon strategy from a previous game and was controlling Lubeck to gain points whenever anyone tried to improve their bag. This, along with also holding control over book improving and key improving saw his green marker shooting up the Prestige marker towards the 20-point spot which would trigger end game.
Some of the play started to be a bit more cautious, trying to avoid giving James any more points, but some were adamant they needed to improve those stats… James triggered end game with a remarkable lead, but did that necessarily translate into winning the game? Yes. Yes, it did in this case. James won convincingly with 37, Darren and Reynaldo tied for second with 26 each, and Iain was just behind with 22.
Simon then arrived with March of the Ants and filled his 4 slots for this 4X game.
March of the Ants Evolved Edition is a revised and updated version released last year of the original March of the Ants (2015), now with shiny new artwork and changes to make the game smoother. March of the Ants is a so-called “4X” game, named after four things you do: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. Typically 4X games have a space theme, so it is refreshing to having a different theme - you run ant colonies.
Four players sat down, we played the standard game (four rounds, the long game is five) using the standard player boards (there are advanced colonies with quirks and other powers). The game flow is super quick, there are five possible actions and these trigger reactions for the players to the left and right – so you’re always engaged with the game. You eXplore new tiles in the meadow, eXpand into those tiles with your ants to gather resources, which you eXploit to evolve your ants (give them special abilities). After everyone finishes actions (running out of food or ants to pay for them), the next phase is battles. There is the Great Tunnel and then all the hex battles (not in the first round), some lovely eXtermination. Then resources are havested, ants are fed, and finally points are scored. This is a low score game, where one or two points are a big deal (final scores are typically 15-25).
There are some nice features of the game, the scoring cards give direction but can be swapped out. The evolutions are not game breaking, but add some really cool combinations. There are only three resources: food, larvae, and ants; so not too complicated to keep track of everyone. The battles are simple to run (with a small amount of hidden information by adding cards, but not overly random).
The game feels close to Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy but not as involved (slightly more evolved). Eclipse is another game with a “cleaned up” second edition that improved on the original (played back in Session 79), whereas March of the Ants Evolved Edition feels slightly less intimidating to play with fewer moving parts to understand, but still a lot to consider.
This left the final table playing Planet Unknown, now on its fifth club play, first out in session 96. Two new comers joined this 4 player game of building planets, where each terraformed area increases your companies resource trackers giving you benefits or opening new levels of tech. You also have to manage your planets rovers to collect life pods and get rid of pesky meteorites that block end game scoring.
In this game each player tried a different company and a different planet, so we all had our own issues and benefits to utilise to maximise the end game scoring. Catherine tried terraforming Charybdis with the Universal company - maximising on the water resource, Jeremy had Tartarus split by a lava flow to contend with but helped by using the Quantum corp - that gave resource switching, Neil struggled with Arashi that is a ring planet, but his Flux company helped mitigate some of the placement troubles. But the best terraformer was Ruth who maximised her Horizon corps multiple rovers to turn Gaia into the best planet.
After the Hanseatic trading shenanigans in the medieval period finished, there was a swift time jump to the 25th Century (call us Buck Rogers) and a location jump from Europe to Mars, as Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game made an appearance. This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a streamlined version of Terraforming Mars using dice as the main resources. Players take the role of corporations competing to terraform the red planet, raising the levels of water, oxygen and temperature. When 2 of these factors reach the end of their track the game ends. There are 2 options to take on a turn – Production, where you get to roll a number of dice determined by the cards you have played so far, and Actions, where you can use your dice to play cards or place tiles representing Cities, Forests or Oceans on to the map of Mars.
Victory points are awarded for tile placement and increasing the 3 global parameters during the game, with end game points coming from the cards that have been played, being the first to reach any of the 3 milestones, and having the most symbols on played cards that match 3 dice rolled at the start of the game. Cards come in 3 flavours, Green adding more dice to your Production rolls, Red gaining you certain dice and placing tiles, and Blue letting you take special actions.
Darren made an early break for it with several cunning forest placements that saw him racing ahead on the score track, and picking up some bonus project cards by doing so. Meanwhile, James was placing quite a portfolio of green cards down, allowing for some hefty production rolls, whilst Iain and Reynaldo were playing blue cards to get some sneaky special moves in. The terraforming seemed to slow down a little mid-game while players switched tactics a little, but James was busy collecting all the milestones. For a while it looked like we might make a switch and call it after we reached just one parameter as all three tracks had slowed somewhat, but there was a sudden surge in oxygen and temperature, and when the oxygen hit max the heat was still rising so we let it continue.
In the end James had a decent victory, mainly due to claiming all 3 milestones, with 39 points, Iain on 34, Darren 29 and Reynaldo 27. This was a great game, and although we played a little slow at times it should play as a faster, lighter version of the original.
Next session is on Wednesday April 1st 7.30pm at the St Ives Corn Exchange. Check out the chat on Discord before the session to see what people are planning to bring or just turn up and see what is happening on the night, there is always a lot of choice from shiny new games to classics.
- Total Session Attendance: 16
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Board Games: 6