Tribal test game and This Town Ain't Big Enough for the 2 to 4 of Us

The elves seek revenge against the dwarves, who have cut down one of their precious trees!

Fg, Martin and I got together for games, and I wanted to try out the Tribal rules. As we don't have any historical figures from the army lists covered in the rules, we decided to proxy using our LOTR figures.

We played the simple Revenge scenario: fg drew the card for attacker, and secretly picked one of my units to kill. He picked two heroes and two warriors units and upgraded his chief and heroes, while I picked a hero and two warrior units, and upgraded all my units.

With no missile unit on either side, we made a beeline for each other, with me aiming to let my upgraded warriors do some damage against fg's regular warriors early.

Two bands of warriors clash!

My unit with throwing weapons charged in and wiped the elven warriors out with their good hand of cards - fg did not draw any card higher than a 4! - but they were charged by the elven chief in the next activation and in turn destroyed. As it turned out this was the unit they have sworn revenge against - the elves are up in Honour points.

At this point fg should probably have pulled back, their honour satisfied. But we played on and my other unit of warriors similarly destroyed the other elven unit, and the characters were becoming outnumbered. Fg then decided to retreat, and the final tally saw the dwarves up by just a few points.

At the scale of the game and with a straightforward objective, the strategy was not complex. I did enjoy the combat mini-game and the decision-making involved. Luck can be a major factor in combat though, but presumably the use of cards instead of dice means that on the whole, your luck will average out in a more predictable fashion than with dice.

In future games I will try to use more warrior units and also missile units and see how that will play out.

While we were playing Tribal, Martin learned how to play a tile game my brother passed to me and we ended the session with three rounds of it.

This Town Ain't Big Enough for the 2 to 4 of Us is a fencing game where players take turn placing tiles with the aim of fencing up areas where they have the most number of "brands" within. The catch is you score a number of victory points equal to the number of the next most numerous brand, so if you had four brands in the area but only one of another brand or brands, you only score one point!

There must be some mathematical reasoning behind the way the tiles were designed, probably some topology stuff, and each game was close but fg won all three games, suggesting that there is a knack to this.

It's a fun game that's quick to learn and has good replayability, and is inexpensive to boot, so if fencing game is your cup of tea, do get yourself a copy of this game.