This week, there were six of us and I was keen to try out my Secret Santa gift, Jamaica. This is a sort-of race game with treasure and piracy thrown in, where your score is determined by how close to the finish line you are when somebody crosses the finish line, how many doubloons you have in your hold, and the value of treasure and curses you have amassed.
Now Mark W seemed to have great difficulty leaving port. As soon as he left, he kept finding he didn’t have the food to pay to stay at his destination so kept moving back. Once he did get going, I started to try moving backwards to keep out of the way of the others as my hold had been filled to the brim with doubloons. Plus I had some supposedly secret treasure – well it would have been if Mark K hadn’t faked a slip of the tongue and warned everyone of its value so they didn’t cross the line too early. Mark G ended up across the line first and had just enough in treasure and doubloons to overtake my total.
This was a pretty fun game and the combat kept things interesting, although my lagging back and others trying to wait for me added a bit to the game length. However, it was still a good game that would play well with the family.
Our next game was my Game of the Month for December but it was the first time we had played it at the club. The Resistance is a social deduction game where, with six players, the four resistance operatives are trying to successfully complete three out of five missions while two spies are trying to sabotage those missions. Each mission starts with someone proposing who should be on the mission team and then everyone voting whether or not to agree to that team. If the team gets voted down, the next person gets to propose a team until a majority of players votes in favour of a particular team. Once the team has been established, each team member secretly plays a card for the mission to succeed or fail, with a single fail card meaning the mission is unsuccessful. Once three missions have succeeded or three failed, the game ends with a win for either all resistance players or for all spies.Our next game was my Game of the Month for December but it was the first time we had played it at the club. The Resistance is a social deduction game where, with six players, the four resistance operatives are trying to successfully complete three out of five missions while two spies are trying to sabotage those missions. Each mission starts with someone proposing who should be on the mission team and then everyone voting whether or not to agree to that team. If the team gets voted down, the next person gets to propose a team until a majority of players votes in favour of a particular team. Once the team has been established, each team member secretly plays a card for the mission to succeed or fail, with a single fail card meaning the mission is unsuccessful. Once three missions have succeeded or three failed, the game ends with a win for either all resistance players or for all spies.
The game came down to the very last mission and after a couple of mission teams had been proposed and declined, it was down to me to choose a team. Now, it has to be said that Mark W had appeared to be somewhat confused all the way through the game and had voted against the successful mission team in the fourth round. So when I proposed a dream team of myself and the three Marks, Nige was quick to point this out to me. However, after careful reflection, I explained that a strong team not only needed brains, quick wits and brawn but also the token bone-head and continued with my original proposal – mainly because I was confident of having worked out that Nige was a spy on the third round. And so it was that the mission was successful and the resistance triumphed.
I really like this game and Nige seemed equally impressed. It plays with between five and ten players and I’m sure the game will work differently with different numbers of players. However, it won’t suit everyone and Guy rated it quite low as it wasn’t his kind of game.
With about half an hour left, we decided to finish off with another game of The Resistance – unusual for us to play a game twice in a row. However, this time, it didn’t turn out quite as well for the good guys. The first mission team of Mark W and Mark G came through with flying colours, although Mark G had been rather too hesitant in picking his Succeed/Fail card and suspicion immediately fell on him. After the spies had managed to sabotage both missions two and three, it suddenly became very tense. Again a couple of mission teams got voted down and I was again the proposer. Now, I was pretty sure that the spies were Mark G and Nige but I wasn’t discounting Guy so even though I put forward Mark K, Mark W, Guy and myself, I did have a slight doubt. The mission team got approved and off they went….and it failed! Disaster but even moreso as Mark W turned out to be the second spy. Mark K and I had assumed it was Nige and Nige had assumed it was me. It was very well played by the spies especially with proposing themselves on the first mission and both voting it to succeed. So, Mark W turned out not to be such a bone-head second time around. Excellent stuff.
Only one boardgame title on Esdevium’s list this week and that’s a new version of a 2006 game:
 
This week we were all lined up for a four player game of Opera when Mark G arrived to give us five players. Once Opera waspacked away again, we opted for 20th Century, the new game from Shipyard designer, Vladimir Suchy. This was an interesting game of trying to balance coin and science production (the two currencies for the two types of auction in the game) with garbage disposal and victory point production. Not knowing the land tile distribution (or more specifically the recycling plant distribution) for our first game, most of us started off pretty conservatively, except for Mark K who bought four land tiles on the first turn with the asociated 10 garbage tokens. For a while, it wasn’t looking too promising for him but he did eventually manage to acquire the necessary recycling plants to get rid of his waste, although we were very kind to him in allowing him to acquire the right tiles without overpaying – I think we were all too concerned with our own garbage and pollution. Nige and I were pretty starved of science points so we were resigned to taking the worst catastrophes while Mark G steadily built up an impressive ‘green’ economy and scored loads in the final bonuses. However, Mark K ended up in a different league as he cleared all his garbage and also scored lots of points at the end to add to an already sizeable lead built up during the rest of the game.
The final Spielbox of 2010 arrived today and includes a “Christmas Tree” expansion for Zooloretto. The bad news is that the instructions say this can only be played at Christmas so it looks like I’ve missed out for nearly 12 months; the good news, however, is that there is a note at the back of the issue that readers of the international version of the magazine are exempt from this restriction. Phew! (Actually, I’m unlikely to play it anyway, but you never know).