Boardgames Sunday

With the arrival of the one-week school holiday Adrian and Thomas were able to come over for a game. With four players,we decided to play a few board- and card games, which are more enjoyable with more players.

The first game we played was Battue: Storm of the Horse Lords.

This is a rather easy game which plays a little like Risk: You have up to 15 soldiers which you can field in "hordes" of up to 8 soldiers, and you move them onto randomly placed tiles of the city, fighting any defenders and looting whatever you find there. In the later stage of the game you may be fighting other players for control of tiles. The aim of the game to is gain the most victory points (which come from loot and tiles controlled). The game ends when three major tiles are occupied (or when only one player is left), so it's pretty much a matter of keeping an eye on the tally and ending the game when you are ahead. A frequent criticism of the game is that there is too much luck involved: walking into a bad tiles can ruin your day, for example. I think to an extent this can be mitigated by the players being aware of who is leading in the victory points and co-operating to bring him down a peg or two.

The second game we played was Dead of Winter, which to me is a mash-up of The Colony and Zombicide... in winter. We were initially a little apprehensive about the scale of the game, which involves a main mission, a mission for the turn, and a secret mission for each of the players. There are several things to keep track of, such as food for the turn, the resource required for the turn's mission, the resource required for the main mission, the amount of trash piling up in the colony (odd, but really quite realistic if you think about it), noise level and the number of zombies that will attract, wounds and frost bites on the characters... However, once we got the momentum going, everything became easier - the fact that we all watched the youtube video on how to play the game probably also helped.

We failed our mission due to a severe shortage of food - we kept finding new colonists instead of food when we searched - but it was fun enough that we want to try this again. In fact, it was so engaging I forgot to take any photos of the game.

The last game we played was something I have wanted to play for a while now: Cockroach Poker.

I won't give the game away, as it really is a very simple bluffing game which you can easily play using a couple deck of cards, but it's a lot of fun, especially after a couple of beers and with friends you have known for a while and can tell when they are bluffing. We played 3 games in a row, with much hilarity. If you are ordering something from an online retailer and they have this and you can save on postage, or if you see it in a store, you should get a pack.