The last event of the year with the holiday upon us saw our numbers at four, which is still a great number for board games as we were all able to play in a single group.
The first game of the night was the card game San Juan, which is based off the board game Puerto Rico. Both games share the idea of building the new world and by trading with the old one. From a mechanical standpoint your aiming to play the best 12 victory point generating cards in front of you. This is achieved by performing 1 of the games 6 roles each round, with the trick being to find a role which has the highest benefit to yourself and lowest to your opponents. During the game Aaron was able to get an early harbour, which meant every trade action net him 1 victory point. This helped him win the game on 41 points,
beating out my more set collection based approach on 40 points.
The next game of the night came from Neil's catalogue of games about trying not to be murdered horribly by ancient evils. This game was Dark Gothic: Colonial Horror, a deck builder about defeating the various for mentioned evil for victory points. Think dominion but with more dark secrets, shocking discoveries and the looming shadows. In a twist to most deck builders I've played it featured three pools of currency to buy better cards from the centre; red, green and blue. When a player feels they have the right levels of each currency in their deck, they are free to take on the central villain card on the table. Neil was able to defeat two of these villains, thus ending the game without the players losing to the shadows. However when it came time to total deck values, it was Aaron that came out as the overall winner; he achieved this by taking the more dominion route of just buying high value cards from the centre.
The last game of the night was the 10 minutes of chaos that is Escape: The Curse of the Temple. This is a real time dice rolling and tile placement game about explorers trying to escape from a collapsing temple. The escape is achieved by players cooperatively exploring the temple to find the exit and allow it's use by adding gems onto the board. The first play through was unusually uneventful, with the players breaking up into two teams to complete objectives and then exit the temple with a few seconds to spare. As uneventful goes against the spirit of Escape, Neil added some curse tiles into the game. These include such fun effects as having to shout "I've found the exit" twice, then adding any tile to the board. Curses added, this next play through was much more eventful for the team consisting of Aaron and Neil with them finding all but one of the curses. The second play through ended in a near win, with only Neil remaining in the temple needing single correct roll to escape as the game ended.
Final scores:
San Juan:
Aaron: 41
Peter M: 40
Tom: 27
Neil: 26
Dark Gothic: Colonial Horror:
Aaron: 1st
Neil: 2nd
Peter M: 3rd
Tom: 4th
Escape: The Curse of the Temple:
Players: Aaron, Neil, Peter M and Tom.
1st game: Players won
2nd game: Players lost
The gamer of the week goes to Aaron for his victories at San Juan, Dark Gothic and for his team finding the most cursed tiles in Escape.