[I thought I’d do a session report here just to call out some games. Sorry in advance for the length.]
So, I had a nice weekend of gaming with a friend last weekend. He’s a Euro gamer that has some more grognardy tastes. So we got a good variety of games in.
We started with U-BOOT. I am already predisposed to dislike games that use apps, and although I understand exactly why this game is using an app, it just made me want to play Silent Hunter III. The 3D model gets in the way of seeing who the different crewmembers are (Herr Pentagon vs Herr Circle) and the weight of mechanics is way, way too much for the gameplay. This is a digital game, right? I know that’s right because I Kickstarted it. I think it was a mistake to make this a boardgame, but if they made lots of złoty on it then good for them. Still. The word for this in my opinion is “tedious.”
PS I can see how with four players you might be able to “get into a role” but with two it was the adjective above.
Then we played Black Orchestra my thoughts on which are here:
My friend was all like “this is just Pandemic with Hitler” and I’m like “what could be better?” Thing is, we won in ten minutes (literally) by killing Hitler with poison gas in Deck 1.
So that was that.
The next day was my big mistake. Because my friend likes interesting mechanics, and generally likes heavy games, I roped him into a game of Churchill with a local friend. Like I said, a mistake. The opaque victory point situation and the conditional decision space really combined to turn him off. “Wait, why are you taking my Production?!” Etcetera. My local friend loves the game and says he would “play it anywhere, any time,” which is probably a bit more than I would give it but at least two of us had fun. I felt really bad blowing an entire long afternoon on it, though, since my friend really didn’t like it. Like I said, I’m a bad person.
The next day was entirely more enjoyable for him. We started with a grognardy game called Ghost Panzer
which is sort of Advanced Squad Leader lite-lite-lite. Our good compatriot @Rod_Humble hates this one, and prefers something called Old School Tactical, which you can just tell by the name is more fiddly. I’m lukewarm on it, myself, but my friend really likes it and has no local opponents so I was glad to indulge him, especially after the Churchill fiasco. I won, btw. We played something like eight full turns in just a couple hours. It moves fast, I’ll give it that.
Ok, so the next game was a really guilty pleasure, called Eldritch Horror. You may have heard of it. We played with the Mountains of Madness sideboard, which really added to the gameplay I think. It also integrated really well with the story. I was impressed. We lost, though, to the Something Elder Something. It ate us. We invited a local mutual friend and the three-player dynamic was great. Our friend had a character who ended up with something like fifteen spells.
The next game was my friend’s choice as well: Labyrinth. He loves this game and was all excited to show me some text-only app that runs the solo bot for you. Ok. I played the Good Guys and it did not go well. We played with the **Awakening: 2010-huh?” expansion, which does some interesting things with an Arab Spring theme but can get very snowball-y if you get too many of those counters out. I got out of Afghanistan as the US but then had to invade Egypt, which had gone Islamist. I resigned.
We rounded out the weekend with Command & Colo(u)rs: Medieval which I felt was a good aperitif. If you have played the original C&C, this version is much more cavalry-heavy—both in numbers and weight (cav now have four blocks per unit instead of three)—because historical accuracy. It makes for a more mobile (and kind of wacky) game, and I’m not a huge fan of the system, but there is nothing like those dice rolls and all the “oh I can ignore a sword because you’re a lower class, and that retreat because I have a leader” nonsense. Bag o’ dice combat is like that.
Then on Wednesday yet a different local friend came by and we played a real game: Ukraine ‘43. This taught us valuable lessons we will be sure to use if we ever need to fight a colossal mechanized war on a steppe. We got through an entire seven-turn scenario (well, six- I had enough victory points to win after six turns and he conceded) in just under five hours. I am becoming a huge fan of the revised Mark Simonitch system: so smooth but with plenty of historical chrome.
We are both so enamored of the system that we will probably try out the Normandy ‘44 game next week, even though it is against my religion to play any games about D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge. We do have a giant 4’ x 7’ version to play on, though, thanks to bigboardgames.net.
And that’s what I did on my days off.
