Friday night’s Star Wars was cancelled on account of a party almost everyone (but me and the GM) were at, so instead I spent the night at home. Randy came to visit, and we played a few boardgames. Life is hard.

We started with Battlelore, using the Scottish Wars expansion, and the Stirling Bridge scenario. That was fun – imagine if William Wallace was a dwarf, and you get the idea of how the game played. I played the dwarves and Randy played the English. All of this was using Medieval Lore rules, which keep some of the Lore cards but reduce their effectiveness. The new units (Mounted Knights and Clan Chiefs in particular) were really scary. Randy charged me early on with his knights and inflicted quite a bit of damage, but the Chiefs fought back and eventually Wallace was triumphant, 5 banners to 3.

Randy introduced me to Dungeon Twister. Oh, this is a mind-bender. I’m not quite sure about the game – you each control a group of adventurers trying to get treasure in a dungeon and get out the other side before your opponents do. It’s really like Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation on acid. I lost this one comprehensively to Randy.

After that, there was a game of World at War: Eisenbach Gap, a fairly simple wargame that simulates what would have happened if World War 3 started in 1985. Randy played the Soviets who were invading Germany, only to meet some American forces. Randy managed to destroy one infantry platoon and its APCs, but his tanks were slaughtered by mine. I’ve played a bit of this solo, and it was Randy’s first game.

Finally we played another game of Twilight Struggle. This was an incredible game – I was the USSR and Randy the USA. I got the early lead (as the Soviets normally do), but after that the score hovered around the same point for most of the game (about 10 in my favour). Whenever we played a scoring card, it’d only be a couple of points either way! Asia scoring – 1 point to Randy. Middle East Scoring – 1 point to me! The Americas did eventually fall to Randy, but I was able to negate the scoring there with another scoring card. The game ended when I played War Games – gifting Randy 6 points, but ending the game with the USSR on 3 points. It had been a very close game, and it’s good to finally win another TS game!

Saturday was our regular Board Game Day with Rich, Josh and Randy. We had this one at Rich’s, which precluded any of the really big games that need lots of table space.

So, we played…

Chrononauts, which saw Josh win the game, although he didn’t realise it at the time. 🙂

Willow, the Board Game, a surprisingly good movie tie-in game, which Randy and I won handily. Well, I saw we, but it was me, pegasus-mounted, bow-wielding Sorsha, who beat up Mad Martigan, stole Elora Danan, and took her home so my mother could sacrifice her and keep us in power forever! I rock!

Notre Dame, the current Eurogame I’m in love with. The players are placing influence in the sectors of the city, and trying to gain as much prestige as possible. Randy attempted to ignore the plague… he didn’t do as badly as I might have expected, but he still came last. I got a lot of gold early, then transferred my influence into the park which meant all my later prestige gains were at +2 or even +3. (When a standard gain is in the realm of 1-3, you can see why that’s significant). I ended up winning the game handily.

Ninja Burger, a Steve Jackson Game where you’re ninjas delivering hamburgers. Theme says it all, really. Very typical SJG, which wasn’t helped by me getting one of the rules dreadfully wrong (you’re meant to draw a card at the beginning of every turn, not just one for going to the meeting). As a result the game was overlong. I forget who won it, so I’d appreciate a reminder before I write it up for BGG.

After dinner, we had a 3-hour game of World of Warcraft: the Adventure Game. This one is pretty good – it basically takes the Talisman game, takes out the endgame, throws in a bunch of quests instead, makes sure there’s character interaction, and plays pretty quickly. I’m sure that we can get this game down to 2 hours or less once we’re familiar with it. I managed to be the first to complete quests to get 8 VPs, although everyone had a lot of fun. (I guess it isn’t that similar to Talisman, but one thing it shares is a very short player turn).

So, that was my weekend. Oh, except for the couple of games of ASL I played solo on Sunday, and the reading I did – mainly of Castle Zagyg material.