15th April 2026
Apart from some pillaging vikings all this weeks games featured creatures with 3 letter names!
Cat in the Box was this sessions starter game. A fairly traditional trick taking game but due to some quantum issues (think Schrödinger’s cat) the cards don’t have suits until you set them as you play the cards. There is a board tracking which cards have been played so you can be caught out in a paradox if you have cards in your hand that you can’t play as you have said you are out of a certain suit or all the versions of a card number have already been played (there are 5 of each number but only 4 suits). Small numbers of points can be made for taking tricks and successfully predicting how many tricks you will win, but the important point is not to get stuck in a catastrophic paradox and get negative points. A few rounds of this mind bending twist on trick taking were played until 2 tables had filled up for their longer games.
Making its club debut was Atiwa, a Uwe Rosenberg game centred around the symbiosis between fruit farmers and fruit bats in the Atiwa district of Ghana. Stemming from a research paper looking at the way in which local farmers were encouraging bats to roost in their farms in order to help propagate more fruit trees. This is a worker placement game taking place over 7 rounds in which players build out their farms, plant trees, herd animals and manage a (hopefully) growing bat population.
Placing one of your three workers on the central board gets you an action, typically getting resources, gaining new areas for your farm, training families in bat care, and crucially, getting more bats. Your own farm consists of a grid of cards that you build up, either terrain or location, and each card has 9 spaces on it for you to develop. Some of these spaces are free, some are reserved for huts, or trees, or goats…or bats. As your community grows you can get more of everything… particularly bats. But you also run the risk of causing pollution which fills certain spaces, and if you haven’t trained the families living in the huts they may decide to cook up a batch of bats when it comes to feeding time.
During the night, bats can fly out to find food, bringing back seeds to create more trees. You need to feed your families, either with wild animals, goats (and their milk), fruit or in the worst cases, bats. Then nature takes its course and if you have multiples of any of the living things, they’ll probably breed. At the end of the game points come from gold, the cards in your tableau and any bats you have in excess of 10. You should definitely have more than 10 bats at the end of the game. Bats are great. Look, there’s a bat on the cover of the game. Get those bats.
Jeremy, Iain, Darren and Steph all sat down to do some bat wrangling. And maybe some other farming type stuff. But mainly bat wrangling. Steph gave a teach, studiously ignoring any bat puns and related nonsense from the others, and then the chiropteran collecting began.
Steph seemed to start sensibly by building up a varied tableau and dabbling in a bit of everything, whilst Iain dived into building up his untrained families (trained families bring in income and are worth some points at the end) at the cost of creating pollution. Jeremy and Darren both went in heavy on the bats, with Darren channelling some of his Skara Brae strategies and eschewing the families to avoid pollution. People just make places messy. There’s room for a few divergent paths, but none of the strategies are wildly different from each other, everyone is working within the ecology to grow their farm. That action space Steph wanted is taken by ‘that pest Iain’, so she then has to pivot onto the space Darren was planning to use.
Mid-game saw a bit of muttering rising up as tableau spaces were filling up and everyone was trying to figure out where that extra tree was going to go, or how to feed that new family. Iain’s settlement was home to a good number of families at this point, most of them trained to not eat bats, but getting there had polluted a fair few spaces, making them untenable for expansion. Steph had some lovely fruit orchards and a number of both goats and wild animals (generic in game turns, but they’re clearly pigs) to keep her families fed. Jeremy had trained several families and was now building up his bat collection. And Darren was just trying to find new roosts for his growing colony. His map was a sea of black with bats roosting anywhere they could fit, boosting his score impressively at the end, but not enough. Iain managed to max out his families for a nice boost, but again, not enough. Jeremy had a large bat colony, but also a few other bits and pieces, and that gave him the edge in the final moments. Jeremy won with 98, Darren 95, Steph 91 and Iain with 67. It was a fun game, plenty to think about for a short game, nicely integrated theme and above all else, bat meeples. What more could you ask for?
The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship a new cooperative game from the creators of Pandemic had its first play at club. Players take on 2 characters each from the famous book / film series and undertake 3 story inspired missions as well as of course trying to throw the One Ring in Mount Doom. All whilst Sauron is searching for Frodo, and the Orc armies are massing and moving across Middle Earth and making the characters lose hope. Each player can use one of their characters for 4 actions and the other for just 1 action before drawing some new cards and then Sauron’s forces getting a turn. Which is achieved by turning over cards paired with the back of the next card in the draw pile to set which half of the card (red or black) is enacted; either moving orcs around the map or adding orcs and searching for Frodo.
In this game the players chose some of their favourite scenes as the selectable missions. Richie selected Boromir’s redemption (and death), Natasha selected the fight with Shelob the spider and Iker chose Legolas counting up Orc kills, whilst Kathy took on Frodo and Sam’s journey to Mount Doom. It was a five player game which started with Natasha and her pairing of Gollum and Eowyn, then Neil with Merry and Pippin (the hobbits travel in pairs) and Gandalf. Then Richie with Boromir and Aragorn, Iker with Legolas and Gimli and finally Kathy with Frodo & Sam and Eomer.
The Shire was soon crawling with Nazgul making it very hard for Frodo to leave even when others tried diverting Sauron with some battles further south, but then an event card suggested Elrond wanted to have a council meeting in Rivendell, so Frodo used that to sneak past all the Nazgul. He then (departing from the traditional plot) moved quickly on to Mirkwood and Erebor to visit the dwarves. At this point Sauron spotted this cunning plan and the Nazgul started circling again. Eowyn killed 2 Nazgul, team Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli prevented evil taking over multiple havens, Boromir took over an enemy stronghold, and the Ents appeared and took over management of Isengard.
All very worthy achievements, however the game cannot be won until the other 3 missions have been completed and so Legolas was valiantly sniping orcs and Boromir was trying to set up a battle he could lose (and die with a witness of his valor) but not so badly that the orcs would take Minas Tirith. With that achieved the team still needed to defeat Shelob, a handy Eagle delivery service got Frodo and Sam and Gollum to the spiders lair and they just won that fight, but hope was almost all gone and there were too many turns for the team to hold out and to also get Frodo to Mount Doom with all the items he needed. So unfortunately a loss, but everyone seemed keen to try again now that the game mechanics were better understood including the special powers of the characters and how they might combine to more rapidly achieve the goals or reduce the effects of Sauron. “There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”
March of the Ants was back for a third consecutive play. Crazy ANT-ics ensued. Right, that’s enough of the bad puns… need to dig ourselves out of this mess. (It’s nice to have an ant-themed game, surprisingly not the only ant-themed game we’ve played at the club: Bites).
Five players, three of them new, sat down to play the unusually themed 4X game (we had planned to play Arcs, but having five we switched to March of the Ants). Understanding the economy, food and ants, is key to building a growing presence in the game; it can be a tricky balance. The game flows relatively simply, with only five actions to understand (one of them being to pass for the round) and only four rounds, the new players got into things quickly - although we did run right up to the end time (last out the building).
Due to a substantial mis-calculation, one player lost their only food source in Round 2 and let another dominate a “corner” of the board… they went on to come last and first respectively. The middle order was a much closer battle, with the ants marching the war against centipedes and other colonies. Someone evolved a horrible species that made everyone else need to feed an extra ant, and the outer meadow Ant Lion’s Den tile caused much fun with everyone being wiped out twice.
A five player 4X game, with three new players, taught and finished in three hours… makes this very approachable within the 4X genre. Glad to see it getting to the table and hopefully will be at the club again. Has inspired us to get into Arcs and Eclipse again.
Returning to the the other gaming table, after they’d finished coaxing bats into their farms, Jeremy, Steph, Darren and Iain all put on their horned helmets (I know, I know) to go a-raiding in the seas of the North. Raiders of the North Sea was back from Session 71, although it’s featured in pub gaming several times since then. This time round Steph added in the Hall of Heroes expansion, adding the Mead Hall, Mead, and Quests into the base game.
Mead is an extra resource that can add strength your warriors whilst raiding, Quests are placed into empty locations once they’ve been raided and can be claimed by discarding cards equal in strength to their required target. They come in 3 different flavours, finishing 3 of the same kind gains a reputation tile. Finished quests and reputation go above the player’s ship and score more victory points at the end of the game. For Valhalla! The Mead Hall is where you go to claim quests and can also pick up some crew and mead here. Once they’re drunk it’s easy to persuade them they want to be heroes.
Early moves were fairly standard with potential crew being gained and a build up of resources for the heavy pillaging to come. A little mead was taken, and some probing raids into the harbours started. The mead was obviously a bit stronger than expected. At one point whilst Darren was checking a point with Runwita Steph the Lǫgmaðr, the bigger boys carried on with their turn before he’d finished. Having to figure out what had transpired in order to take his viking back set some sort of precedent. The golden rule of Raiders is you start your turn with one viking on your board, you end your turn with one viking on your board.
This was not always the case.
“How many vikings do you have?”
“Where’s your viking?”
These phrases were uttered more than once by Steph, the long-suffering Jarl of St Ives. Mainly in Darren’s direction.
Raids were taken, mead was flowing, plunder was plundered, provisions were provided, and Iain silfr-þjófr did not steal too much silver from the others. Darren was managing to complete a goodly number of quests in the name of Odin, much to the consternation of the other raiders, but discarding all the cards was slowing him elsewhere. Monasteries and Fortresses were falling whilst he went a-questing. Pests were rife as ships prepared to sail one way only to see another get there first. Valhalla was welcoming many a fallen warrior.
End-game approached rapidly as fortresses toppled, and plans were foiled as the required vikings got swapped out for those not suited for the task. In a not-at-all shocking conclusion Steph Sigrid took the win with 53, Iain Silverside took second (but not all the silver) with 46, only just pipping Jeremy Ragnarok at 45. Darren Saga-seeker was also playing, but all those quests meant he scored little elsewhere and ended on 34. Barely enough to cover the entrance fee at Valhalla’s lowliest mead-hall.
The next session is on Wednesday April 29th 7.30pm at the St Ives Corn Exchange. Will the Ants be back for a fourth consecutive session? Or will the games take a more historical turn? You can help decide by joining the Discord chat before the session or turning up and choosing from the games brought on the night.
- Total Session Attendance: 14
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Board Games: 5