The Thomas Wolsey

Last week I turned up to Cult to find a Gospel band playing. Cult were kind enough to reserve some tables for us but it was too noisy for board gaming so we opted to go somewhere else. We tried Isaacs but it was pretty busy that night so ventured on to The Thomas Wolsey. Again, it was pretty busy but we didn't want to turn the night into an impromptu pub crawl so we made do and settled there for the night.

I didn't stay for too long that night but I did manage to fit in a game of the United Kingdom version of Ticket To Ride. I was just ahead on the score track when the game ended and there were just the tickets to score. We revealed the tickets and  I was feeling reasonably confident. I had not only completed all my tickets but also completed more tickets than anyone else. However my confidence was misplaced as I came in last. The others played Cosmic Encounter and I'm pretty sure some other games were played in my absence.

This week we were back at Cult and things were back to normal. We started off with a couple of games of Red7 and then launched into a game of The Bloody Inn while the others played Codenames. We played the longer version of The Bloody Inn and I got my highest ever score. I think this proves that Priest is an overpowered card. It's probably being removed from my copy of the game from now on.

Afterwards we played Mai-Star, a small card game by Seiji Kanai of Love Letter fame. This was not only the first time Alex had played it at the club but also the first time he had ever played it. The game is played over three rounds. In the first round I did pretty badly. In the second round I took a big risk on scoring one of the high value cards and failed. I was in last place. For the third round I chose to take an even bigger risk, trying to play the highest scoring card in the game. It was going to be all or nothing for me. Somehow I managed to pull it off and a smile even crept across my little face. I think the scores were something like 18, 19, 20 and 45. A pretty crazy card.

We finished off with a game and a half of Pandemic: The Cure which is pretty much Pandemic: The Dice Game. The first game didn't go too well. Not only in the sense that we did badly and lost easily but also in the sense that Alex didn't like the game. I feel how well you do on the game is dictated a lot by the characters you use so we cheated a little, hand picked our characters and tried again. We fared better this time but Cult was closing so we had to abandon mid-game.

Mike brought along the Reiner Knizia classic Samurai which made its IpBoG debut and Danny ran a game of Chinatown and I think I caught a game of Quaridor being played.

Ghost Ship

Alex was kind enough to bring a bunch of games he owned that he knew I was interested in playing. I jumped straight at Libertalia. We'd just set up a game when three new guys arrived. We could hardly leave them playing on their own and they expressed an interest in Ghost Stories so I dropped out to teach them that. Libertalia would have to wait for another day. I guess we got around 17 people this week so a pretty good turn out. Term time starts soon so there will probably be a bit of a drop as people leave for university.

It had been a while since I'd played Ghost Stories and I wasn't a hundred percent sure on all the iconography on the cards but apart from a couple of minor mistakes I think we got by without too much accidental cheating. As it was the other guys' first time playing we chose the easiest setting. A couple of rookie mistakes that I was as much a part of as anyone else meant we got a few haunted tiles pretty quickly but we managed to flip them back using the blue monk's double action ability. In the first third of the game the board was looking pretty overrun and I thought we were at the point of no return but with a few lucky dice roles we managed to clear most of the ghosts from the boards. One of the guys had to leave but the nice thing about a co-op like Ghost Stories is that we could just continue with a player down, democratically taking his moves for him. As Wu Feng appeared I took a hit for the team and my monk was killed. Wu Feng's incarnation required four reds to be destroyed. The plan was for the yellow monk to use his bottomless pockets power to grab a bunch of red tao tokens and head over to Wu Feng to take him out. We set Circle Of Prayer to red to make the exorcism easier but before the yellow monk made it over the blue monk made a perfect roll (well, a red and two wilds) and took out Wu Feng on his own, stealing the glory for himself. We did pretty well in the end and I think we would have probably beaten it on the normal difficulty rather than initiation.

I hear Libertalia went well. Dan said he enjoyed it but he won so he would have enjoyed it. It's a kind of pirate ship themed role selection game. I'm hoping Alex will bring it another week. After that they played Coup. Pandemic and Ticket To Ride was at other tables.

Mike turned up with Taluva, a game he'd been promising to bring for a while. He'd likened it to Kingdom Builder; an interesting, slightly abstract strategy. The game didn't disappoint. For a start it looks great and the tiles are so thick and chunky, the kind of components that beg to be touched. First I played it with four players and it was a quick, fun little game with a bunch of interesting choices. Towards the end it could have been anyone's game and everyone did their best to block the next player from getting the final move they needed to win but pretty soon there was nothing that could be done and Adam claimed victory. After this I played it two player, head to head with Mike. Maybe it was just because I had a feel for the game, but it really seemed to shine with two players. Instantly I could see how my decisions really impacted the game. After a strong start in the early game I made a couple of mistakes. I was sure Mike was going to win but before I knew it the last tile had been drawn and the game was over before Mike had managed to make a comeback.

On the table next to me there was a game of Space Cadets: Dice Dual and some more Coup. Next week is freshers' week so we'll have to wait and see if there's enough room for students and board gaming nerds, or if we've been shunned for the night by the cooler kids.