The event on 6th May 2023 was a fun night of games with friends.
- Fresco
- Man Bites Dog
- Catan
- Mysterium
- Namiji
- Jamaica
- Century: Golem Edition
- Endangered Orphans: House of
- Rath
- Organ Attack
- Stuff Happens
- 5211
- Anno 1800
- Food Chain Magnate
- Ra
- Labyrinth
- Scarface 1920
Mike asked …
I saw Tim and yourself playing Anno1800. Looked amazing (lots of tiles). Session report? How did it go?
Ettienne replied …
We had a good time with it. The game ends when one players plays out the last of the cards in their hand, but to build up your engine will often bring more cards into your hand. Managing to strike a balance between self sufficiency and trading with your opponents also brings in a different set of considerations. And then the scoring opportunities diverge later in the game as people obtain secret scoring cards, which are tied to your different types of workers, which could again lead to increasing your hand size.
I think we had an easy game as there wasn’t a lot of competition for tiles, effectively turning it into a pure efficiency race. My cards probably synergised more than Tim’s, so I was able to make do with fewer buildings. I managed to get an early cannon down, which allowed me to expand my fleet and do more exploring, but Tim was able to piggy-back off that and simply trade with me for cannons. That’s a nice mechanism to prevent people from being locked out of production chains. It also becomes crucial in >2 player games as there are only 2 tiles per production type. So I suspect there’ll be a lot more tension the more players there are in terms of what you develop vs what you trade for from others.
We also didn’t make full use of all the different actions. We basically did the expansion, exploration, upgrading workers and playing cards. We didn’t swap out cards that maybe didn’t dovetail nicely with our existing productions. We also didn’t pay gold to recover used workers for and additional action or two before recalling all of them.
It does take a while to wrap your head around the different production chains that are available and what you need for each step in the chain, as well as the different types of workers you need to actually benefit from it.
It’s definitely something that should get better and better with more plays, especially as you become familiar with the typical requirements and different rewards the cards can offer. Then there’s also the multitude of public goals that can dial the interactiveness/take-thattiness up to 100 or down to 0, depending on your preferences.
We might look to get a multiplayer game going at the Escape, so if there’s interest (for the Saturday), let me know and we can try and schedule something.
Thanks Ettienne for the game report 🙂
