This week we played Dungeon Lords and had a great time. Jeff has played around twenty times and taught us well, throwing in jokes from the rules. We played for two and a half hours, but we ran through an extended tutorial and played slowly. Jeff said we could play it in 90 minutes with experience. The combat tutorial was superb. I wish more complicated games would include these as understanding the rules well made our first game much more enjoyable.

I can’t beat Andy Merritt’s description in his catalogue:

Dungeon adventure board game with an impressive array of components, including two double sided boards, and three further boards, and heaps of cards, tiles and figures. The big twist is that the players are not the adventurers, but rather the assorted shady characters who set up dungeons! This they do competitively, and sometimes it will be necessary to indulge in a little evil to get the job done properly – unfortunately the more evil used the stronger the adventurers that dungeon will attract. Ahhh, the trials of being a dark lord…

Brian Bankler and Chris Farrell have both criticised it for feeling:

a little truncated. It seems like the story wants to develop more, but, on the other hand, the game itself doesn’t want to be any longer.

Personally, I felt the game ended at the right time. You would have to simplify it too much to include more combat rounds in a reasonable time-frame.

Chris also says that:

the determinism of the combat phase is thematically odd and may make it more of a brain-burner than it wants to be.

This what makes the game great. A game with a light feel, but that still requires serious planning. The rest of the game has plenty of chaos and randomness – ruining plans entertainingly.

We played the Advanced rules. Maybe Chris and Brian were playing the Basic rules? Brian recently said this might be his top game of 2009, so he must have reconsidered.

I would not play Dungeon Lords with non-gamers, or even casual gamers, but in the right environment it is excellent. Dungeon Lords manages to be deep, intuitive and has a fun theme. I like it as least as much as Agricola, which may have more variability, but it lacks the fun. Rather like Space Alert, it’s all about seeing plans fall apart under pressure, but it’s less hectic and requires serious strategic thinking.

Jeff was so busy concentrating on teaching us, he made a few mistakes, picked up a lot of evilness and so had to draw both paladins. Ian managed to stay good, but ran out of money and food early. I thought I was going to win as I avoided any serious mistakes until the last turn, but I ran out of money and failed to get enough food, so my monsters deserted me and the last adventurers ravaged my dungeon. Final scores:

1. Ian – 13
2. Iain – 4
3. Jeff – 3

At least none of us got negative points, so we got our Dungeon Lords licences.

To start the night, we played High Society. I always enjoy this game. I think I prefer it to Money or For Sale, as it’s just as fast and strategic, while being more intuitive. Luckily we played the good-looking Uberplay version, not the ugly new Gryphon Games version.

I should point out that the Isleworth Gamers have a session reports blog. I normally post here before that is updated, so it’s not easy for me to link to the reports individually, but it’s worth subscribing in Google Reader if you like session reports.

After Fluxx I joined in with a group of five players for the evening – Jon, Dan, Maynard and Russ.

Pick Picknic
Simple 20 minute kids game or filler. I can’t improve on Rick Heli’s summary. I didn’t realise there was a Prohibition-themed version too. The artwork is typical Doris Matthäus quality. I will pick this up for my girl when she’s a little older and she has her cousins over. For usability it would be good to replace the chicken food cubes with numbered counters.

Space Alert
I was bewildered for the first training mission, as the room was pretty noisy. I could barely hear the audio track, cleverly played from Dan’s phone, and there is quite a lot to take in at first. By the second round I was starting to get it and by the third advanced round, with the battle bots, I was starting to think strategically even though I was still useless.
I like the cooperative aspect and the planning under pressure is fun. I’d like to play this again in a quiet room with other experienced players.

China
A classic 45-minute area-control €urogame with multiple interlocking scoring mechanisms. I traded away the original version of this game, Web of Power, a few years ago and this session made me regret it a little.

The Adventurers
This ended the night and was perfect to learn after 10pm. You play a tomb raider escaping from lava and rolling boulder traps. I was the only new player, but still managed to win it, which shows what a random knockabout game it is. The components are excellent and it’s crying out for customisations, expansions and variant rules.
This was my favourite play of the night, even though it’s not necessarily the best game. Maynard deserved to win, being the only one with the nerve to memorise the lava tiles, but he got a little too greedy at the end and was squashed by the boulder with under five spaces to move.

I enjoyed it, although was a tough grind, as I had only read the simple version of the rules. By the middle of the game I was able to manage my board without too much help.

I can see why it’s so popular. There is plenty of variety, lots to think about and little luck. The theme is well handled. (Even the reference to Alex Randolph as a leader of civilisation wasn’t too jarring.)

My only complaint is that the core mechanic is quite unintuitive. More and more I’m missing the clean intuitiveness of early eurogame designs. I’ll clean my palate with a few weeks of lighter fare before I take on a stodgy main course like this again.

7/10 although I’m positive my rating will rise once I fully understand the system.

Carson City is a clever and complicated worker-placement and building game (Caylus with gunfights) which will need several plays to get used to. It lasted 2.5 hours, which felt a bit too long, but we played with five, which may be too many. I expect it would work better for two or three. The Western theme did not work for me. Dice Town implements its theme better as it is more about shoot-outs and gambling than slowly building a town.

Gareth had already won this game three times, and it really showed. Jeff, with ten plays, had not seen such a high score. Gareth manoeuvred himself into the first choice position going into the final round, amassed over $100, picked the sheriff, which let him reserve the the action that allows you to buy VPs for $5. After that it was all over. Phil took to this game well too, scoring a load of points from fire-power tokens.

1. Gareth – 44
2. Phil – 34
3. Iain – 30
4. Barrie – 25
5. Jeff – 24

6 Nimmt!

It’s surprising after a decade of playing German games that I have never played 6 Nimmt. I only played one hand, but it was a nice fun filler – working perfectly in a club environment. Quite a lot of tactics for such a simple and light game.

Galactic Emperor

In a nutshell – Puerto Rico in space with fighting. Twilight Imperium was one of the worst gaming experiences of my life. Galactic Emperor uses the same theme and basic structure but strips out the ridiculous play time. At one point I worried it would run on too long, but it finished quite suddenly. There was plenty of table talk and everyone seemed to enjoy it.
7/10 but will probably rise.

Money!

I have been meaning to get hold of Money for years. The new version has top quality linen-finish cards and the artwork is good. The simple rules, simultaneous bidding and short duration all make this feel similar to For Sale.
8/10

Game 1:
Scott – 650
Iain – 460
Steph – 290
Maynard – 60

Game 2:
Maynard – 530
Scott – 520
Philip – 510
Iain – 440
Vicky – 140