17th Nov - Frank's game day

Trying to choose what to play

Frank hosted a game day and it was a chance to get to meet some of the people who had posted on the Horsham guild of Boardgame Geek. There were 6 of us in all and it was good to meet Frank and Kevin for the first time.

We started with a quick game of Diamant which makes for a nice ice breaker, it's a very simple push your luck game that's a good laugh. It's not the sort of game where you can plan your moves but Steve took the strategy of running away as early as possible, it seemed to work as he ended up winning.

Steve 32, Frank 26, Garry 24, Kevin 16, Neil 16, Aga 13

Now that we were warmed up and had got to know each other a bit better we went for something in a big box. Eketrop is a game that I'd bought at Essen and fortunately accommodates six players. You have a set of viking meeples and a tiny version of the board behind a screen, everyone places their meeples in secret and reveals them at the same time. When Vikings share a space they fight for the resources, which is resolved using numbered cards, a nice balancing mechanism is that after the battle you swap cards, so watch out that you don't give all your 6's away to the same person. With 6 players there were a lot of fights but things didn't drag at all, it's a fairly light game but very enjoyable and produced to top quality Queen Games standards.

Kevin 28, Steve 24, Aga 25, Neil 22, Garry 18, Frank 12

Eketorp

Time for a couple of rounds of 6 Nimmt before lunch. A very simple card game where you play your numbered cards on the end of a higher numbered row, the idea is to get rid of your cards without having to pick up the whole row when you play the 6th card. Not as easy as it sounds.

Steve 19, Neil 20, Kevin, 22, Garry 23, Aga 31, Frank 38

Frank 'mad-eye' Bradshaw contemplating wether to go higher or lower.

After pizzas for lunch we played 'what shall we play next' for a little while and settled on Vinci, "It's a bit like Risk but without the dice" said Steve, and it was. You pick up a couple of chits which give can you extra points or powers for your empire, for example you may get 1 extra point for each pasture or be able to attack others easier. Once your empire has grown it's best to let it decline and then start another, this can take a little getting used to. With 6 of us there was plenty of conflict which kept things moving along quite nicely. Steve and Kevin had played before and took an early lead, but as we all got the hang of it we started to catch up, well most of us did, I seemed to get stuck at the back after about half way through. Kevin and Frank finished joint first and we all expected to see Neil come in a close 3rd but he made an ill advised choice of empire chits and ended up 5th.

Frank 100, Kevin 100, Steve 98, Aga 94, Neil 88, Garry 87

Aga about to start another fight

It was a great day and we play a nice selection of games. Thanks to Frank for hosting.

1 comment:

Colin said...

Nice report Garry, looks like you had a great time and met some nice people too. Hope none of them play green!!!
As you can probably tell I'm missing it already :(