John Farrell has added me to his page of Extended Stats from Boardgamegeek. It’s a really cool page that has a bunch of stuff, including “Games I should play soon”.Fun list. 🙂 There’s a couple of games there that I’ve actually played recently, but I hadn’t marked them down as played on BGG. Need to do so, I guess.

More fun from BGG is the games I’ve played per month. This has skyrocketed after I added the online games I’ve played on BSW from March onwards:

Our latest BGD was fun – actually, I was playing 2-player games with Randy on Friday, and 3- and 4-player games with Mike, Rich and Randy on Sunday. What did we get up to?

Friday – Anzac Day

* Advanced Squad Leader SK #1 – Randy and I finally sat down to play the first scenario that would eventually lead to the most monster WW2 wargame of all. It was great fun, and I’ve got a bunch of pictures on my memory stick to prove it – alas, I haven’t gotten around to writing the session report yet. I’ll do that either tonight or tomorrow. The game took us about 2-1/2 hours, which isn’t bad as Randy hasn’t played ASL before, and his Squad Leader days are long behind him. Still, Randy’s hardly an inexperienced wargamer, so he picked it up pretty quickly.

I played the Yanks and Randy played the Germans. (Randy, being a Germanic Canadian, almost never plays the Yanks if he can help it, and being German just helps it along). I began with my troops on a road in a village, and Randy’s Germans did horrible things to them. Then reinforcements came along, and we found ourselves staring at each other over either side of the road.

Randy won the game – just – although he went home thinking I’d narrowly won it. A little after he left, I realised I’d managed to completely muck up one of the rules: you can actually attack units in a melee in any way you like. So, instead of two separate battles forced by me splitting my attacks, Randy could go for the 3:2 attack on my squad+leader… and his first DR would have wiped them out. Really close game though, and I’m looking forward to our next one.

* 1960: The Making of a President – I don’t have Twilight Struggle, so we opted for its newest cousin. Randy won this one, although he really, really thought he was losing for a lot of the game. He played Nixon, I played Kennedy, and Nixon’s Lazy Shave almost completely turned the game around (I won all three debates). However, vote recounting and control of the media gave Randy the advantage and he won the election & game by about 80 votes. Not as good as TS, but still a lot of fun… and with any luck, my copy of TS will arrive by the end of this week.

* Battlelore – Randy and I regard BL as the least of the three recent C&C games: Command and Colors: Ancients, Battlelore, and Memoir ’44. However, this was the first game I’d played with the Lore rules and I found the game really enjoyable. I haven’t played enough C&C:A yet, so I can’t really form an opinion on it. BL really needs more scenarios in its expansions, but it’s a fun game of fantasy war. I won this game… narrowly.

Three very close games – you’ve got to be happy with that!

Sunday – Game Day

We set this day up so that Mike could attend it, but his busy weekends continued and only allowed him to attend the afternoon. Still, we finally gave him his first game of Agricola and he enjoyed it. I’m glad he did, as it’s his copy! I made sure he took it home with him, and hopefully he’ll get a solo game in (or a game with his wife) now he knows how it works.

Randy won Agricola, by building a nice house. His farm was pitiful, but the house gave him enough points. We really had problems expanding our families this game: no-one reached 5 members!

Notre Dame, my newest game purchase, was the other game we got to play with Mike. This one was really, really interesting. There’s a drafting mechanic, and influence cubes that get placed on the board mean that the more times you take an action, the more effective it gets. Mike was message-boy, Rich was park-boy, Randy was influence-boy, and I spent a lot of time in the hospital or Notre Dame. As a result, I lost by a long way, and everyone else was pretty close – though Randy just managed to take the victory, IIRC. Very interesting game, and I really want to play it again. We all thought Rich would have the game, but Randy just took it at the last. Rich really played this game well.

You’ve got to love any game that has rats and the plague in it. 🙂

After Mike left, we went onto Princes of Florence, which I’m still in learning mode for. Guess who won – that’s right, Randy. Randy and I both managed to get 6 works completed, which is rather spectactular, but Randy’s were worth lots more than mine. This game will be wild with 5 players, but 3-players is good for learning it.

Tigris & Euphrates is a game we used to play with Rob, and I really missed him as we dusted off the box for our first game in some time. Randy suggested this because it’s a game that I tend to do well at. Indeed I did – I won narrowly over Rich, who did exceptionally well. Randy got pasted. I’m amazed Randy did so poorly, but I’m glad to see there’s a game that I’m much better at playing than him. 😉

We ended our game day with a session of Talisman 4e, the game SRM describes as his favourite bad game. The game took about 45 minutes, and included my Warrior (who was in the lead) being turned into a Toad by Randy’s evil Wizard! We all did fairly well, but Randy got to the Crown first; we played with the quick-play variant where that ended the game. I possibly could have gotten there as well, but I was having too much fun elsewhere. I find Talisman to be a great, light-hearted game; such a difference to how I find Runebound and Prophecy. I’m sure we’ll play it again.

By then it was about 9.30pm, and people had to leave so they could get some sleep. So, they did.