Games night 31st March

This week Agricola was the game of choice. No PN again so set up for 3 players while we wait for PM. PH chose the intermediate deck. MC took the plunge and the starting piece and proceeded to not play very well. PM generated copious amounts of grain while PH dominated with the animals. Had to recheck the rules regarding the room extension action regarding the quantity of Reed required. Turns out it is one Reed regardless of how many rooms added.
End game result – MC: 24, PM: 29, PH: 40. Seeing as it’s the first game PH has won in a while, a certain smugness filled the air. Well done PH!

Mag-Blast piqued PH’s curiosity despite being slightly put off by the rule stating if you don’t make a spacy zappy sound when playing a Blast card, it misses. PH dominated by having 4 cruisers and obliterated MC pretty early on. MC was having fun as well! Despite being knocked down to only two defending fleets, PM managed to hold his own, mainly through PH not having any matching yellow Blasts for his yellow turreted cruisers. PM playing minefields on his own ships, didn’t help himself much either. In the end PM was able to destroy PH with a direct Blast bombardment having taken out the southern cruisers.
A fun game, though MC would have enjoyed it more if they weren’t taken out of it so early on.

Games Night 24th March

We all played StarCraft Risk for the first time. MC only picked it up a year ago (almost to the day).
MC – Orange Protoss (Zeratul)
PH – Purple Zerg (Kerrigan)
PM – Red Terrans (Valerian Mengsk)
We decided to go for the Basic Training 3 player game – what with us comprising of the number 3 and not having played this version of Risk before. The pieces were set out just like the instructions dictated, except PM wanted to be Red instead of Blue.
PH started, being the person who chose this over normal StarCraft.
The game mechanics were quickly understood and play moved pretty quickly with MC getting the control 18 territories achievement and PM getting the control 8 mineral fields achievement.
MC dominated Shakuras and PH quickly owned Zerus and PM briefly had total control of Korhal. MC won and lost Auir (chose the 2 planets achievement to stop PM getting it). After a bloody battle over several turns PH got control of Char until PM announced he had troops on its moon.
Finally MC, cashed in his cards for reinforcements and crushed PM’s presence out of Aiur gaining him the Aiur achievement and winning the game.
PH held the Char achievement briefly before PM pointed out that sneaky moon.
Generally well-received and the game mechanic limiting each invasion to three armies or less, stopping the inexorable steamrolling of bigger armies from just sweeping across the board led to some more intelligent (and hugely flawed) placements of reinforcements.

Cthulhu Gloom was then summoned forth. PM was the one to kill off all of their family members first, and won the game. MC came second with PH not far behind. We had a better understanding of the rules this time round and played a better game.

Games Night 10th March

According to the voting system, Quarriors! was the most voted for game with all of 2 votes. The system works.

MC started off game one and acquired a dragon pretty early on, PH barely got started before MC became victorious.

PM made the first move for game two, PH didn’t score anything before PM won.

PN started off game three, PH barely got started before PN won the game.

Things looked good for PH at this point, but it was late and we called it a night.
It is unusual for the starting player to win the game, and had we played a fourth game, I’m sure PH would have proved that.