Dang, I hate when a whole week goes by and I still haven't managed to get a game night report posted.  You'd think that a holiday weekend would be good for finding time to write, but with 2 little girls at home, no moment when they're awake is ever really free.  And thankfully, I actually had the chance to play more games after their bedtime, both with Gwen and then alone a little bit, but I'll get to that report later...

Alien Frontiers [BGG]

When I walked in last week, I was able to sit right down at a table with Mr. Alien Frontiers himself (Chris from DiceHateMe.com) to put our Game of the Month! to bed.  Not only was it cool to play with him, Michael, and his friend Shawn for a change, but Chris also had the prototype for the upcoming Factions expansion along with him for us to try out.

There are two big things that Factions adds to the game.  First are the appropriately-named Faction boards, which each player gets to choose from at the start of the game.  Each board gives its owner a special ability, but also provides an extra space for any player to dock a ship (for a small cost paid to its owner) to get some other ability.  The other main addition is a deck of Agenda cards, which grant one bonus point for each of the three regions named on them if you control it at the end of the game.


Here was my Faction board, which I used on the last turn to move a colony to control all three of my Agenda territories.

Chris picked up a Faction that let him place a colony from the Colonist Hub when it was on the #6 space (rather than on the last space as normal).  He started using his "grandma strategy" early on, dedicating all of his ships to advance on the Hub and eventually claiming the Asimov Crater which let him move even faster on the track.  And if he used the docking ability of his own Faction, he could actually use four dice each turn to move on the Hub.  I was sure that he would win, but then, for some odd reason, he stopped using his combo-o-matic, and focused on building up his other infrastructure.  

In the meantime, I managed to build up my ships and make a move for the Colony Constructor.  Luckily, my Agenda card was for Bradbury Plateau, the Van Vogt Mountains, and the Heinlein Plains, all of which supported my plan anyway.  And once I got control of all of them and used the Colony Constructor almost every turn, it was pretty much over.  I did use Shawn's Faction's docking ability for 3 turns or so, which prevented anyone from raiding me and helped some as well.

I placed out all my colonies to end the game, and with my normal score plus getting all 3 points from my Agenda card, it wasn't even close.  They were all pretty surprised at such a lop-sided game since most of their games have been very close, but our experience over the last few weeks has definitely been that one person can capitalize on an advantage and pull ahead pretty significantly.    


Time: 65 minutes
Score: Norton 12, Shawn P 6, Dice-Hate-Me Chris 5, Michael 4
Ratings: Norton 8, Shawn P 9, Dice-Hate-Me Chris 8.5, Michael 8.5

I'll be writing a full review of Alien Frontiers as soon as I have time, so I'll hold off on much comment about the base game right now.  I really liked what the Faction boards added to the game, though, and can't wait to get the final version of the expansion.  I had a few issues with the Agenda cards, but I won't go into that since it is still a prototype and changes could still be made to them.

Carnnival (prototype) [BGG]

Speaking of prototypes, Chris then pulled out the new game that he and his wife Cherilyn have been working on for the last two weeks.  Okay, let me say that again, two freaking weeks!  And it's been designed, prototyped, taken to Origins and demoed for people, entered into beta playtesting, now has its own website and entry on BGG, and they're even talking about an eventual Kickstarter campaign to get it published.

I'm not going to give a lot of details about it, other than to say that it's a set-collection card game with a really interesting little twist that involves rolling some dice and doing compulsory actions with them each turn.  It's pretty light, but with the twist, I'd say after just one play that it's probably similar in weight to something like Bohnanza (which is a pretty easy game overall, but has some unique twists that make it a little hard to grok).  Plus, I absolutely love the theme (putting together carnival rides), and thanks to Chris' mad skillz in graphic design, even the prototype looks pretty amazing.

In this particular session, I played pretty poorly and didn't have a lot of options at the end, but I could definitely see that other people with more experience were able to really manipulate the mechanisms of the game to get a lot more control than I personally felt.  If nothing else, I'd definitely have to say that the combination of card play and dice-rolling/action selection is unlike anything else that I've played before.  I'd love to play it again, and hopefully will be able to get my hands on a prototype sometime relatively soon both to keep playing at game night and introduce to my wife!      

Time: 35 minutes
Score: Shawn 4, Dice-Hate-Me Chris 2, Michael* 2, Norton* 2
Ratings: Not rated since it's still in playtesting

The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game (LCG) [BGG]

The Lord of the Rings LCG is probably my favorite game of the year so far, and last week I was able to introduce it to two new players (Josh and Steve), who joined Kenny and me to face the hardest of the Quests, Escape from Dol Guldur.  We blew through it, actually, and won without a lot of trouble.  But since then, I've learned a few things that probably would have made a big difference.

First, I actually had someone else pull out the Nazgul (which it says to do in the setup of the first quest card), so I didn't even look at it right then.  I was expecting the third quest card to tell us to pull it out or something, but when it didn't, I looked at the Nazgul itself, which said that it should have actually come out in the second phase of the quest as soon as we made any progress and freed the prisoner.  So our first illegal advantage was that we were able to plan our attack on it carefully, rather than have it smack down upon us as soon as we made any progress on the second stage.

Second, I finally got around to reading the offical FAQ this week, which lists some errata for the Nazgul of Dol Guldur, stating, "No attachments can be played on Nazgul of Dol Guldur."  And since we pretty much neutralized it with Forest Snare (an attachment), I figure the whole game was rather ruined.

But anyway, we still had a lot of fun with it, and now we get to play it again "the right way" to see how bad we can lose!    

Time: 75 minutes
Score: Heroes of Light (Kenny - Leadership, Josh* - Spirit, Steve* - Tactics, Norton - Lore) - Win (145 points), Escape from Dol Guldur - Lose
Ratings: Kenny 9, Josh 7.5, Steve 7, Norton 9

The best thing is that we also made the The Lord of the Rings LCG our Game of the Month! for July, so I'll get lots more time to play around with it.  Maybe we'll even see the first Adventure Pack (The Hunt for Gollum) this month!


Animal Upon Animal: Balancing Bridge [BGG]

We finished off with a game of Balancing Bridge and then I let the rest of the guys play a game of uber-Animal-upon-Animal using all of the pieces from both games.

Time: 13 minutes
Score: Keith - Win, Ian -1, Josh -2, Kenny -3, Norton -3
Ratings: Keith 8, Ian 8, Josh 8, Kenny 8, Norton 8



These were from the game of Balancing Bridge...



And these were from the game of Uber-Animal-Upon-Animal, which never really had a significant collapse.

Other Games Played

7 Wonders
Time: 31 minutes
Score: Chris 61, Britt 53, Shawn 52, Kenny 51, Josh 47, Steve 47, Tim* 36 
Ratings: Chris 9, Britt 8, Shawn 9, Kenny 8, Josh 8, Steve 7, Tim* 8 

Agricola
Time: 60, 60 & 45 minutes
Game 1: Sceadeau 49, Ian St 42, Matt 36, Ian S 24
Game 2 (Family): Sceadeau 42, Brett* 21, Allison* 21
Game 3: Sceadeau 49, Chris 47, Matt 41
Ratings: Sceadau 10, Ian St 10, Matt 10, Ian S 9.5, Brett 8, Allison 8, Chris 9.5

Alien Frontiers
Time: 72 minutes
Score: Chris 8, Tim 7, Britt 6, Steve 4
Ratings: Chris 8, Tim 9, Britt 8 Steve 8

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer
Time: 75 minutes
Score: Josh* 60, Kenny 52, Shawn 47, Keith 42
Ratings: Josh 8, Kenny 7.5, Shawn 10, Keith 7.5

Carcassonne
Time: 60 minutes
Score: Stacy 134, Shawn 120
Ratings: Stacy 8, Shawn 7

Hive: Carbon
Time: 10 and 10 minutes
Score: Britt - 1 win, Kenny - 1 win
Ratings: Britt 7, Kenny 7.5

London
Time:  93 minutes
Score: Josh 62, Steve 40,Tim 38, Ken 26
Ratings: Josh 7.5, Steve 8, Tim 8.5, Ken 7.5

Macao
Time: 110 and 70 minutes
Game 1 Matt 90, Sean* 78, Stacy 59, Ian 58
Game 2: Ian 100, Brad* 68
Ratings: Matt 10, Ian 10, Stacy 10Brad 7

Thurn and Taxis
Time: 90 minutes
Score: Stacy 22, Ian 21, Sean 19, Brad 12
Ratings: Stacy 8, Ian 8 , Sean 7, Brad 7

Troyes
Time: 105 minutes
Score: Chip* 31, Britt* 28, Keith 28, Shawn 27
Ratings: Chip 7.5, Britt 7, Keith 7, Shawn 8

* First play for that Person