Spiel: Boardgaming in the UK

I’ve just put in an order for a few games from Allgames4you.de which should turn up next week. Three big box games: Santa Cruz (the new Hans im Gluck release); Helvetia from Glen More designer Matthias Cramer; and Michael Schacht’s Africana. On top of that are four little games (just to please Nige): Zooloretto Wurfelspiel; Keltis – Das Wurfelspiel; Wurfel Bohnanza; and Bullenparty.

My latest batch of Ebay games has less than three days to run and there are lots of good games up for grabs. One of the highlights is an unplayed copy Mystery of the Abbey complete with Pilgrims Chronicle expansion. Another has to be Wolfgang Kramer’s classic Tikal and Tikal II, while Reiner Knizia is not to be outdone as the original Kosmos edition of Durch die Wuste (Through the Desert) and the clever astract Fish Eat Fish can also be yours for a very modest bid.

Lovers of cool bits will find much to admire in Utopia and Giganten, while those with more refined tastes can sample tea in Darjeeling, coffee in Guatemala Cafe or the opera in … err… Opera. Those explorers among you will get a kick out of Klaus Teuber’s brilliant Entdecker (the original Goldsieber version) or developing Leo Colovini’s Islas Canarias. Those looking for three player games can’t go far wrong than look at one of the best three player conflict games, Das Ende des Triumvirats, while two player abstract fans can build bridges in Ponte del Diavolo.

Semi-cooperative game fans really ought to look at Mousquetaires du Roy (All for one and one for all – except one who’s trying to thwart them) while ancient history buffs should be satisfied by Magna Grecia, Municipium (Reiner again) and Klaus Jurgen Wrede’s excellent Mesopotamia.

Basically, there’s something for everyone. Advert over. Go look at my Ebay page here.

As I ususally do on Superbowl Sunday, I had a go at predicting the result by playing a boardgame version. The last few years I’ve used Pizza Box Football but this year, 1st & Goal is the new kid on the block so it seemed appropriate to see how this played out. I used the base game so there were no team idiosyncracies to take account of.

Bottom line – In a game dominated by the Giants, a couple of key fumbles by the New England offence meant they were playing catch-up in the second half but couldn’t break down the New York defence enough to make it close. The Giants win the Superbowl.

Q1: The Patriots started the game on their 25 yard line but after one first down had to punt it away. The Giants were initially successful with a 24 yard run play but eventually stalled and had to settle for a field goal. New England’s next drive lasted just four plays but they soon got the ball back after intercepting Manning around midfield. Although they again had to punt, the Patriots gathered up a fumble on the return, giving them great field position on the Giants’ 23. On the last play of the quarter, a six yard rush brought New England into the endzone for the lead 7-3.

Q2: The euphoria of scoring had obviously got to the defence as New England gave up 30 on the kick off return, followed by 45 yard and 32 yard completions to restore New York’s lead 7-10. On the second play of the Patriots’ next drive, they coughed up the ball giving the Giants great field position just 23 yards from the New England endzone. Two superb run plays took the ball in to give the Giants a 10 point lead but things were about to get worse as the Patriots fumbled the kick off return, leaving the Giants in even better position on their opponents’ 21 yard line. The Patriot defence eventually brought themselves back to life to stall the Giant offence but still had to suffer a field goal 7-20. New England had time to get a field goal and prevent their opponents from scoring again to leave the score 10-20 at half time.

Q3: The Giants returned to the field feeling pretty happy and were content to keep things tight and wind down the clock. However, the Patriots defence still couldn’t stop the mon the key plays and Manning capped an 80 yard drive with a 10 yard touchdown pass midway through the quarter 10-27. New England made some progress on their reply but still were forced to punt as the quarter drew to a close, not helped by giving away a crucial offensive penalty. The Giants ended the quarter on their own 42 yard line.

Q4: By this time Manning was mixing up the plays and New England didn’t seem to be anywhere near the same wavelength. Another touchdown left the Patriots 24 points adrift with too little time left. At least, Brady started to make some headway but the giants were happy to give away short yardage and eat up the clock. A New England touchdown with a couple of minutes to go brought up the inevitable onside kick but the Giants succeeded in recovering it. Another first down gave them a further field goal attempt but it fell short leaving the final score 17-34. The New York Giants are Superbowl champions.

Yesterday saw my 4th play of Friedemann Friese’s brilliant solo deckbuilder, Friday, and my first win. Woohoo! Going into the pirates, I only had one life point left so wasn’t very confident but I had a number of cards giving me extra life points. These gave me the flexibility to draw extra cards and I managed to get Robinson to escape the island with 2 life points left.

Score:

Fighting (36) + Pirates (30) + Life (10) – Aging (-5) – Hazards (-24) = 47

I’ve got a new batch of 24 games up for sale on Ebay with 9 days still to run. Lots of good stuff this time. The list is as follows:

Tikal

Tikal II

Giganten

Mousquetaires du Roy

Durch Die Wuste (Through the Desert)

Guatemala Cafe

Opera

Mystery of the Abbey

Mesopotamia

Utopia

Darjeeling

Magna Grecia

Fish Eat Fish

20th Century

Municipium

El Paso

Pizza Box Baseball

Das Ende de Triumvirats

Key Largo

Islas Canarias

Ponte del Diavolo

Ys

Entdecker

Royal Palace

The Ebay listing is here

Jan and I have just returned from a week’s holiday in Tenerife where we had brilliant weather, a nice hotel offering plenty of activities – Archery, French Boules and others. Two wins at the French Boules – archery is clearly a game of millimetres and I was millimetres the wrong side of the line every time.

Managed to smuggle several games over to the Canaries and back again thankfully, as I got stopped at Customs on the way out as their scanner was showing a large amount of organic matter. Not sure why as I’d only taken LOTR: TCG, Ra: The Dice Game, Cafe International: TCG, Gloria Picktoria, Coloretto, MR: Jack the Ripper, Dominion, Mijnlieff, Archaeology:TCG, Stich Meister, Gold and Keltis: TCG.

Got to play five of them including two four-player games of Coloretto with my Dad and Jan’s stepdad. Even though it took them a while to grasp the rules, Geoffrey (stepdad-in-law) won the first and Rod (Dad) won the second. The good thing was that, after the first game, they both wanted to have another game straight away.

2011 saw me play 200 games of 156 different titles (interestingly, just one fewer than the 157 different titles played in both 2010 and 2009, although the total plays is down a bit compared with 208 in 2010 and 229 in 2009). My full list of games played is here.

My most played game was Lord of the Rings: The Card Game which saw 8 plays. All bar one of these was in May when the game was first released but I played again just yesterday and I’d like to play some more in 2012. I’m still exploring the mono-sphere decks and haven’t yet progressed beyond the first scenario so there’s plenty still to try out, even though I will not be buying any of the expansion packs.

No other game reached 5 plays and only Nefarious saw four plays.  Of the 156 titles, 125 of them were played just once, again due to my focus during the year in getting my unplayed games list down. It started 2011 at 29, dropped all the way to zero in June and is now sitting at 16.

2011 seemed to produce several really good games. My six picks for the year -which I’ll be publishing on my Trickylight site tomorrow- included two meaty gamers’ games (Trajan and Vinhos), a couple of middle-weight titles (London and Pantheon) and two excellent but different fillers (Biblios and King of Tokyo). I’ve also done a six picks of solo and two-player games featuring LOTR: TCG, the surprisingly good Revolver, Famiglia, Gold, Mijnlieff and Zertz (which I got to play for the first time in 2011). All in all, a pretty good year. Let’s hope 2012 is just as good.

It’s too long since I last played Pandemic so I decided to try out a solo game playing two characters. I randomly drew the Scientist and the Operations Expert, which seemed like a good combination. And sure enough, using the Scientist’s ability to discover a cure with four cards of the same colour (rather than five), we soon cured the yellow disease and the black one. The spread of black was fairly well contained so we managed to eradicate it completely, which was quite a good move. Having also, by that time, cured the red disease, it was looking really good for us.

I decided that now was the time to ignore they spread of the yellow disease and go all out for that final cure. We’d only suffered four outbreaks up to that time so it seemed like an easy ride to victory and sure enough, my Scientist collected the four blue cards necessary and the Operations Expert joined him in London and built a research station ready for the cure to be discovered on the next turn. However, disaster struck, an outbreak of the yellow disease in Lagos triggered a chain reaction of three further outbreaks and the world was doomed. So close and yet so far but an excellent tense finish. I really, really like Pandemic and have upped my rating to a 9. We need to get it played again on a club night.

Four new games arrived on Christmas Day: Paris Connection was a gift from my Mum and Dad; Santiago de Cuba was from Jan; while my Boardgamegeek Secret Santa surprised me with two games – Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer and Barons. Good stuff.

We’ve already tried Paris Connection and Ascension both of which were very good. We also got to play Top & Down (which was a bit trickier than expected for one of Schmidt’s Easyplay line of games) and Braggart (which was really good take-that fun).

This is a test post. Please ignore.