28th October 2026
This session featured our standard varied blend of games with themes covering history (Romans and Vikings), exploration (Lost islands), and nature (breeding foxes).
The session started as usual with some classic club short games including Love Letter, Knarr and Ecosystem, now on its 35th club play.
Knarr was back at the club for a short but fun viking themed game of building your crew, having bards sing about your reputation, exploring new lands and trading with them. Last played in session 120.
On your turn you can either recruit a new crew member, which activates that and all crew of the same colour you have, or you spend your crew to explore new lands. You can also spend other recruits (non-scandinavians) to help explore, or do some bartering with your bracelets to activate all your explored locations for their goods. The aim is to get 40 points which is attained from crew, exploring and reputation - if you have had enough bards sing about your exploits! The strategy to this game is knowing when to spend your crew to explore. If you go to early and spend your crew, you may lose out on the bonuses of having those crew. If you go to late, then someone else can pip you to the 40 points, making it difficult to catch up in the last round.
Darren and Neil were new recruits, with Richie having set sail before, and with Jeremy showing everyone the ropes. The first few rounds is all about building your crew and hopefully a synergy of colours which brings in more resources. Then it was a scramble for the nearer places to explore (that cost only a few crew) to build up some trade routes for all the bracelets that had been accumulating (you are only allowed 3 maximum). Then Jeremy, who had created a nice set of crew bringing in fresh recruits, ventured to the further away islands (requiring more crew) first, but was closely followed by the others following suit. Reputation had been building up so everyone was getting a point per turn by this stage (this can bring you 4 points per turn if you maximise your bardage!) In the end Jeremy managed to trigger the end game by sailing off to a fair away isle and initiating a final trade. Richie managed to get past 40 points as well, but couldn’t catch him, with Neil and Darren following in his wake.
When we knew there would be 12 players we decided on how to divide up into three games of four players.
Lost Ruins of Arnak is always popular and Steve volunteered to teach two new players and one with a little previous experience on the basic map but with the leaders expansion. Unfortunately there was only time to complete four of the standard five rounds but everyone had a good time and were keen to try this one again and without the teach it should fit a session.
Ostia had been pitched in advance on Discord but the remaining seat was easily filled on the night. The theme of the game is around exploring the ocean around the port of Ostia, where you will have the opportunity to trade and improve the port.
Though this has a main board indicating the ocean exploration, the main puzzle of the game is in your personal board. This is where you produce resources based on the number of ships in the chosen space, but then you have to distribute those ships clockwise round your board and the last one chooses your action. Hence the tricky choice of whether you will get the right resources to support the action you end up doing and whether that action will help you develop the highest honour and win the game.
Richie then taught The Fox Experiment to three new players. This is a classic Richie game involving lots of dice rolling. The games premise is based on a real experiment by some Russian scientists trying to recreate the process of domestication by only breeding from the friendliest of foxes. Over just a few generations as well as the “friendliness” trait becoming more pronounced, the resulting foxes also tended to have floppy ears, spots and curly tails.
The game plays over five rounds or generations of foxes. The first stage is a drafting one, players must choose 3 things, but in the order they think most tactical, a male fox, a female fox and a position in the next round linked to a bonus. There are only 5 male and 5 female foxes in a four player game so if you want to snag a fox with certain traits better choose early or you will be left with a less genetically fit fox. But focusing on fox selection might mean you go last next round. Then there is a simultaneous phase where you breed your foxes, this involves rolling dice for each trait on your parent foxes card and a wild card dice and any bonus tokens you picked up to enhance your baby foxes.
At the start of the game you selected a mission card with certain combinations of traits on it, if your new fox meets that requirement then you can score end game points. So generally you will be trying to select parent foxes more likely to generate that combination of traits or spending your bonuses so baby fox makes that target. The dice have part or whole symbols on them and you need to try and maximise the number of whole traits you can mark off on your new fox card. Then you count up how many marks you have which is the overall friendliness of your fox (end of round score for the player with the friendliest fox and a compensatory wild card token for the rest) and collect tokens for traits acquired. You can then spend these tokens on enhancements like another wild card dice, being able to breed more fox cubs, another mission card and being able to score an end game bonus. As a nice touch you can also name the baby foxes, so fun was had with various name themes throughout the game. Then the baby foxes are put in the pool of male and female foxes and up for grabs in the next round and it continues. But with friendlier and friendlier parent foxes being available the number of dice being rolled for each breeding attempt increases and by round five you could be rolling 15 dice plus tokens, Richie’s best resulting fox was a 20 trait scoring one.
Richie managed to make and then select in the following round some very friendly foxes so he got the additional victory points for friendliness in four of the five rounds. However the other three players had not chosen missions involving the purple trait (curly tails) so the new parent foxes did not provide many purple dice and Richie’s mission did require that, so overall he did not score so much on the missions. But there are a lot of other ways to score points, through research cards, the end game bonus selections and from higher upgrades on the enhancement board and leftover bonuses. So scores were fairly close at the end with Richie’s experience just paying off with a one point lead over Kathy and her mission card filling strategy and Neil and Jeremy just behind.
Next session is on Wednesday November 11th 7.30pm at the St Ives Corn Exchange. Join us for some winter gaming fun. The following session on the 25th will be the last games session of the year and Charity night, where we will be raising money for East Anglia Children’s Hospice (EACH) through donations, bake sale and a games raffle.
- Total Session Attendance: 12
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Board Games: 6