8th July 2026
Although the title sounds like the club had switched to Judo and achieved a rare double ippon situation, in fact one new game set in Japan was so popular two tables were playing it.
As usual the night started with some shorter games. This time a relaxed Love Letter table with players swapping in and out as they arrived or found longer games to join.
Graham bought along a new game to the club Mantis, a light card game from 2022 for up to six players brought to you by Exploding Kittens, the company behind … Exploding Kittens. The rules are extremely simple. Each card is double sided, with a colour on one side and three colours on the other side, one of which is the colour on the first side (honestly it makes sense). This means that by looking at the card back you have a one in three chance of predicting the colour on the front. The game is all about collecting sets of the same colour and then scoring them. The first player to score ten cards wins.
On their turn a player picks a card from the top of the deck and either plays it in front of themselves or someone else. If played in front of someone else and the colour on the front matches the colour of some of their cards you take the lot. If you play it in front of yourself and it matches the colour of some of your cards then you score them. If the colour does not match, then either your opponent keeps the card or you keep the card depending on where it was played. This means that you get some quite large stacks of cards changing hands frequently when they are stolen before they can be scored. Despite James T building up an early lead, Dave just managed to pip him to ten points and win the game.
Meanwhile the first Nippon: Zaibatsu table was getting setup and explaining the rules to a new player. To find out more have a look at the previous play at club in session 128.
Then two medium length games got underway, Middle Ages where first time player Darren excelled at acquiring the most windmills and barracks for a decisive victory and left the others with pretty similar scores trailing behind.
Meanwhile Alex, Will, Dan, James T and Dave got stuck into Ra, Reiner Knizia’s famous auction game, with an ancient Egyptian theme. Played six times at the club, players take it in turns to pull tiles from a bag and place them on a central display. Players can trigger auctions themselves (by declaring “Ra”!) or auctions may be triggered by the game when a red tile is pulled from the bag or when the central display is full. Players then collect various types of tiles to score points over three “epochs” or rounds. All of the players were new to the game other than Dave (to whom the game belonged), however the rules are very easy to grasp and everyone got the hang of it very quickly. Hardly any red tiles were pulled out early on so the first epoch lasted a long time but curiously not many points were scored. This meant that during the second two epochs red tiles were constantly being pulled and so there was an odd cadence to the game. It finished with some very low scores (the highest being 38) and Dave obviously did a bad job teaching as he was the final winner. Maybe next time he teaches it he will explain all of the rules…
Those games finished at about the same time and as the final Nippon: Zaibatsu players arrived. So there was a table reshuffle and the next games selected were Catan: Seafarers and Above and Below.
Catan: Seafarers is an expansion of classic Catan, introducing a slightly larger map, boat mechanics and a pirate. We played the scenario with an island shrouded in fog to sail to and explore. Players started on two large islands and it was quickly apparent that those who had built their initial settlements around the hexes with an 8 were in luck tonight. Sheep and Stone were proving hard to access and it took a while to get rolling as no one had much to trade. Then Neil and Kathy struck out and started exploring the mystery island in the fog though it seemed to have rarer numbers on its hexes.
James then set sail a little later but headed East and discovered a separate three hex island with nice common number hexes and was soon rolling in resources. Alex had decided against nautical endeavours and focused on building cities and acquiring development cards. He tried to slow James but his private resource rich islet and long continuous route to it was unstoppable and soon it was all over with a surge to reach 15 points and game end, beyond the 14 required for this scenario.
Above and Below returned for some more town re-building (after being driven from our previous village) and cave exploring adventures. With Jeremy the teacher there was Will, Dave and Dan all trying to earn victory points from collecting resources, constructing buildings and having the best reputation from their adventures.
Dan and Dave had good starts managing to secure some good income from resource gathering and buildings, whereas Will and Jeremy concentrated on adventuring. Unfortunately the early attempts of exploring with a few basic villagers - ended with Will running away from a bat and Dave stealing from a merchant - both reduced their reputation. Where as later in the game, Dan had recruited some kick ass villagers and ended up playing a crystal trumpet in a cave to much acclaim! The game ended with Jeremy’s last foray into the caves where he met up with a mysterious lady who wanted to sing for the king of the caves, with a bit of cooperative dice jiggling he managed to find the king and re-unite him with his lost queen!
Everybody enjoyed the town building, villager recruiting and adventure story telling combination, even when the final scores were counted showing that Dan had scored the most victory points, with Dave, Jeremy and Will following.
Next session is on Wednesday July 22nd 7.30pm at the St Ives Corn Exchange. Will Nippon Zaibatsu return or will some other club favourites be back on the tables, see you at the next session to find out…
- Total Session Attendance: 14
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Board Games: 7