Warhamster Rally
This week, we decided to have a go at Warhamster Rally, although Nige wasn’t keen when I described as a cousin to RoboRally. It’s not quite as brain-burning as RoboRally though as you are only programming one move ahead rather than a series of moves. Players try to race their Warhamsters down one side of a course, round a marker post (actually a Battle Budgie) and back to the finish line also marked by a Battle Budgie. The space you land on determines which direction you face at the start of your next move but, of course, just like RoboRally you can end up being shoved out of the way and hence facing a different direction from the one you expected. Then there are the other creatures who can also get in your way, which can make progress rather tricky.
John suffered early on and took quite a while to get even half way down the first straight. Mark K took a useful lead and was first to round the corner. Mark G shoved my Warhamster out of the way and proceeded to take a second move to go past me. Unknown to him, the shove put me in a better position and actually meant the move I had chosen earlier pushed him into a Kobold Khin space so losing him a turn. I then did my best to put obstacles in the way of Mark K and Nige came up on the rails. I made a mistake on my last turn as, had I chosen a different card, I could have crossed the finish line using my final action chip. As it was, all I could do was stare as Nige crept across the line to take the win.
It took us a while to iron out some of the rule ambiguities and that slowed the game down quite a bit. I think once we were familiar with the game, it would have played much quicker and on that basis Mark K, John and I gave it reasonable ratings. Even though he won, it wasn’t Nige’s type of game so he rated it pretty low.
After Warhamster Rally, we just had time for a shortish card game and, as we hadn’t tried Jericho before, we gave that a go. This is another one about building walls and collecting points for having the longest wall in each colour (like Knizia’s Great Wall of China that we played a few weeks ago). This time, three scoring cards are shuffled into the deck to determine when scoring takes place. A player has three choices: he can place a coloured card to start or extend a wall, place a wild wall card to remove the highest valued card in a particular colour, or put a card in the pot, these being the victory points won in each colour when scoring occurs. This means you you want to add cards to the pot in colours where you have a decent lead but then, you run the risk someone will overtake you.
I quite enjoyed this. There is certainly a bit to weigh up but you are a bit at the mercy of the cards you draw. I didn’t draw a wild card all game whereas John seemed to have nothing but wild cards, which meant he was unable to establish any decent wall colours. In the end, Mark K ran out as winner, having been able to claim two good sets of walls in the first scoring round. Although Nige got a massive stack of blue cards in the second scoring, it was never going to be enough to overtake Mark.