30th September 2026
Games about the smallest of creatures, saving creatures from biblical events, farming and hunting creatures, trying not to be killed by hostile creatures and terraforming entire planets, occupied the tables this session.
First up was Noah played once previously at club. The aim is to load animals onto boats and clear your hand fastest and try not to get caught with raindrop icons on cards remaining at the end of the round. The boats have quite stringent loading conditions, either same sex animals only or alternating male / female animals and boats have a weight capacity which cannot be exceeded, if you can’t play you pick up all the animals in the boat and to make things harder the previous player sets which boat you have to add to. As everyone was playing quite tactically there was quite a lot of boat refilling rather than completion and we had to call the game early to move onto the longer games, which meant Iain just acquiring the title of master animal loader, one point ahead of Neil, whilst James, Jeremy and Kathy were stuck getting soggy on shore with all the pandas.
There was much discussing about what to play for the other short game, Scout was mentioned - with the infamous story about the terrible rules misunderstanding was recounted “In Scout you cannot rearrange your hand of cards”. But in the end Kingdomino was chosen - a simple and fun tile laying, kingdom building game.
It’s been a while since Session 125 and apparently that Odin chap had got hungry again, so time once again to plan A Feast for Odin: The Norwegians. This time around Steph, Steve and Darren were shepherding their Viking clans into procuring goods to cover the land and goods to fill the bellies. Darren went straight in for some boat action, building a whaling ship and a knarr in the first round, with Steve joining him and also building a knarr (which in no way whatsoever led to multiple attempts at no/nah/knarr puns throughout the game). In a reversal of previous plays Darren also went for an early explore to claim the island of Lofoten, only to later regret not holding out for a slightly better island as it was very low scoring. It did help boost income and bonuses though, which can be a great help in the early game.
Incomes were all fairly low for the first half of the game, even with a few islands in play, and there may have been some minor whining from Steve at each income phase when he proudly announced how much he was getting, just to find the other 2 had more coming in. The 3-player board has some minor differences in the spaces available, so there were a couple of instances of someone looking for the space they wanted only to realise it didn’t exist (mainly Steph, as neither Darren nor Steve showed that level of awareness about what spaces should be there). A few of the choice spaces were proving very popular, leading to a few exclamations of “You pest!” as someone else claimed them.
Steve claimed an island around the time Steph and Darren were contemplating getting their second, but he had filled a good number of his negative point spaces by then. It was about this time that Steve and Darren also noticed that Steph had been quietly breeding sheep for a while and had a veritable flock. This almost caused tears as Steve reminisced over his long-lost pig “Porker” who had miraculously survived multiple generations in a previous game (he really hadn’t - Steve’s Vikings were just terrible at telling different pigs apart), but feasting was soon back on the agenda.
Steve’s new-found island started to cause him grief as he couldn’t find good placements for the loot he was plundering and refused to listen to the other chieftains when they suggested he didn’t need to place everything the moment he got it. In a daring raid Steph managed to snag the English Crown, which would make a lovely centrepiece on one of her islands. Or possibly one of her buildings, as she had also been building enough huts to make a small city. Or a large village at least.
The last couple of rounds turned into a scramble for the blue and green goods required to fill land spaces over the reds and oranges needed for feasting, as there were still a surprising number of negative points showing across all the player’s boards. All the cheaper plunder had been taken (along with the not so cheap Crown of England) and with money converting into points, the name of the game became upgrading goods (red>orange>green>blue). A shock move from Darren saw him grab another whaling ship and another knarr in the last round, and emigrating them both for some very tasty points. Then realising he should have waited a turn in order to use the boats to help upgrade a bunch of goods. And then the feasting was over. There was some brief confusion as the scorecard was filled in with a couple of Steve’s and Steph’s scores getting swapped, but in the end it was a clear victory for Steph with 141. Steve and Darren coming in with 106 and 99. Probably not enough to keep Odin full for long…
March of the Ants: Evolved Edition had been suggested in advance on Discord, back for its fourth play with three players making the tiny mighty. The game is a 4X-style, but unusually not with a space theme; instead you are an ant colony and you can explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. This is, for the genre, a very streamlined experience and although the three players had played before it was a while ago – regardless everyone was able to get back into the flow really quickly. The action choices are clear and simple (only five).
Simon managed to find an early evolution which gave his exploring ants a big boost in exploiting the meadow (harvesting resources). Iker was on a bit of a war path. Dave went for a large colony with lots of ants. Simon also managed to get two goal cards (which let you score points) into play early, netting a lot of points but at the cost of resources that could have been used to grow the colony. It was discovered a mistake had been made in setup, too many “easy meadow” tiles had been stacked on top (10 instead of 6), so exploring was rather uneventful (and no centipedes joined the party). Also because the three players had played before, Simon suggested adding in one of the expansion modules – “Nests”. Nests give players a special power triggered by eggs, which are placed as a new option for Reactions. They were a relatively light rules add-on, and did give some interesting choices for Reactions; overall they were cool (and as whacky/powerful as some of the events cards).
Despite this, the game was close with the three divergent strategies ending with 2VP between 1st and 2nd and 3VP between 2nd and 3rd. So very close. Hopefully this will be on the table again soon.
So the final two tables took inspiration from the games brought on the night and went space theme, competitive planet building and cooperative survival.
Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game was back for a third session (previously in 79th and 37th sessions!) with a spaceship of three badly prepared researchers about to discover what was hiding in the vents, taking on the mission inspired by the original Alien film. Team Research aka Scientist James, Technician Kathy and Medic Neil did not have a great start to this cooperative adventure and Aliens are notoriously unforgiving.
It is a deck building game so you start with a lot of low powered cards, both James and Kathy drew the same starting 6 card hands, most of their fight cards together when there wasn’t much to scan or fight and not enough star cards so they couldn’t buy new and better cards to improve their deck. This meant in the second round that they then had insufficient fight cards when the Aliens were starting to show themselves but now did have some spending power. Neil used one of the new cards he had bought during his better start to lend Kathy 2 stars so she could buy the best card on offer, one that would provide superb Alien butt kicking powers in the future. The team were very excited by this stroke of luck, but incredibly concerned straight after when Kathy then had to take a strike card, due to not being able to deal with the Alien menace, and pulled one of the worst cards in that deck, a card that meant she would have to permanently discard a character card if one was drawn into her hand at the start of the next round. Well Kathy only had one character card, the aforementioned uber Alien killing one and there was a just less than 50:50 chance of her drawing it. How unlucky would the team be to lose the lovely new card before it had even had a chance to shine, well obviously that is what happened and now Kathy was a few rounds in and back to only having the basic cards to help the team.
The Aliens were quickly building up with Kathy and James not really contributing to thinning out their numbers, Neil was star player holding his corner and mowing down Aliens whilst tossing out healing, so the team managed to work through the first three objectives. But the fourth stage of locating the Alien Queen and flushing her out an airlock proved too much for the slashed and acid covered crew, “Game Over, man!, Game over!” to quote one of the marines who would soon be dispatched (Aliens) to clean up this mess.
Five players wanting a go at terraforming planets (some of them upgrading from kingdom building to planet building) sat down to play Planet Unknown, last played at the club in session 122. Its a game of landing polyminoes of different terrains onto your planet (from the space station in orbit), where each resource on the terrain (civ, water, biomass, rover or tech) increases your corresponding companies resource track and unlocks benefits. There are different planets and companies to mix and match, so lots of combinations to keep it interesting. Add to that personal objectives and shared objectives between neighbouring planets, and events each turn increases the challenge.
Four new comers joined Jeremy in this terraforming scramble. Due to the S.U.S.A.N. space station everyone can play simultaneously, so once the rules have sunk in, the game ticks along at a quick pace. Most players opted for the starting planet and company to get the hang of things. Iain and Calvin had a shared goal of least meteorites collected, which Calvin aced by using a few civ cards, and maxing his tech track (which stopped placements of new meteorites). Unfortunately for Iain, he only changed his strategy near the end, this left his planet quite pock-marked and reduced his scoring significantly. Richard jumped in with a noxious planet and the Cosmos company, but never quite found a synergy between them to complete his personal objective. Natasha was trying to advance all resource tracks, but was hampered by all the red alert events that kept regressing the tracks. Jeremy was terraforming Oblivion using the Flux corporation, a strange inside out map, but the combo worked rather well to net him two objectives.
In the end Calvin topped the terraforming charts, with Jeremy, Natasha, Richard and Iain following.
Finally a short game of Money to finish the night for those whose space adventure had come to an early end. This is a set collecting game with a secret bid element to determine turn order when selecting the cards on offer to add to your collection. With three players there wasn’t quite enough competition over the different sets and it was an emphatic win for Neil, reasonably close second for Kathy and poor James was left with the small change.
Next session is on Wednesday October 14th 7.30pm at the St Ives Corn Exchange. You will need to enter via the back entrance due to the Michaelmas fair taking place on the main street at the front.
- Total Session Attendance: 14
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Board Games: 7