The Elasund in the Room

So I have no idea what games people that went played this week. At least Bang, Lost Legacy, Codenames and, I think, The Resistance. Although almost definitely lots more.

So I finally got round to playing Tragedy Looper. I dunno if it's just me being dumb but I found the rules pretty confusing. About half way through I got the hang of it. Basically if the mastermind doesn't manage to kill someone in a loop we win. At least for the scenario we were playing.  The game is pretty much 90 percent deduction and 10 percent luck. Luck must have been on our side because we managed to deduce who the killers were and guarantee a success, moving everyone away from them. It was a strange game of confusion and cross referencing. I'd probably enjoy it more the second time now I actually get what's going on.

Afterwards I played Elasund: The First City. If my board game history is correct, when the guy that made Catan first made Catan it was a much more complicated game but the publishers made his simplify it. Elasund is kinda all the stuff that he took out. And it feels like Catan for sure. Again there's dice rolling and if a 7 comes up bad stuff happens. But instead of placing roads and buildings you're placing walls and, urm, buildings. We let Dan get a big lead and tried in vain to stop him all too late. He hit the victory condition when everyone else was about half way there. More board gaming nonsense next week!

The Great Old Ones

In what can only be describe as some sort of Bank Holiday Miracle I've managed to do a blog two weeks in a row. You are truly blessed.

Tim is usually busy on Mondays but usually has bank holidays off from his usually non-board gaming duties. This bank holiday was no different and he came baring Cthulhu Wars and had brought along Steve for good measure. Steve is a human and not a board game. Matt soon joined and we had four players, the required amount. Although Tim wasn't so happy because allegedly Matt always wins. We got off to a quick start and the game instantly reminded me of Chaos in the Old World. It's pretty asymmetric and my faction was Hastur (chosen because he had a creepy mouth).  As far as I could tell a decent strategy for me was to desecrate the land to gain power. Unfortunately this meant I didn't control many gates and this left me trailing behind on the score track with Matt just ahead while Tim and Steve were far off in the lead. Matt spent the beginning of the game summoning monsters and biding his time. I guess we were both playing the long game, whatever that was.

Matt was Cthulhu and as it turns out one of his abilities was to submerge and appear anywhere on the map, letting him perform surprise attacks wherever he liked. So after gaining enough power to summon Cthulhu, that is exactly what he did. At around the same time I managed to summon Hastur which gave me victory points every time I desecrated a new area.  Matt also realised that he got victory points every time he summoned Cthulhu which meant he started sending him on as many suicide missions as he could. One of the criteria for winning was to have all the spells in your spell book. One of my spells required me to award three victory points to a player of my choice. I chose Matt as he was furthest behind. Well, except for me and of course I couldn't award them to myself. The game ends at the end of the round where a player scores over 30 victory points. After this happens we added up everyone's points. Everyone made it across the line except for me, but I was on 28 so not as bad as it could have been. And it ended up Matt had the most points with 32. So it seems Tim was right, Matt does always win. Although I did feel slightly responsible, I did award him that three points. I'm counting it as a joint win.

Of course, other games were played. Definitely Coup and definitely Discworld: Ankh-Morpork. Two games of Discworld in fact. Also Alex had brought something which I think was almost definitely Elasund: The First City. It was definitely some sort non-Catan based game with a Catan kind of theme. So either that or Candamir: The First Settlers. But my money's on Elasund.