So, I played a couple of games of Memoir ’44 with Mick – a couple of very good games – and then went home about 9pm, incredibly early for me!

Saturday was the big “Farewell to Alara” event at Good Games. I was playing in a big (40+ players) sealed deck event where everyone got 6 boosters from the Alara block for Magic: the Gathering, made decks from them, and then played for five rounds. I lost my game in the second round to Julian, but won the rest of my games, ending up in 2nd place overall.

The deck I had was insane: Maelstrom Pulse, Apocalypse Hydra, Meglonoth, Blightning. A friend of mine described it as “Singleton Jund”. It wasn’t, but it was a very interesting deck to play. The deck was split between these major big creatures and mana acceleration, the net result was that I was putting out bigger and better threats than my opponent. Julian beat me by having enough control to deal with my big creatures. Chris almost beat me, but got into a horrible situation where attacking me would kill him due to the Meglonoth.

After the tournament, I managed to get in my first four-player game of the Game of Thrones LCG. Hmm. Honestly, it’s not that great a game. Multiplayer CCGs are hard – the best I’ve seen was Babylon 5 due to how it ran conflicts. Vampire is nice, but runs into horrible problems when a good deck has a bad deck next to it – seating order can matter too much. A Game of Thrones is fun, but not brilliant.

Sunday saw me in Good Games again. My first task was demonstrate Command & Colours: Ancients to Mick; continuing my introduction of the other big C&C games to him: Memoir ’44 and C&C Ancients to him. M44 is all about using the terrain to your best advantage; it’s far more of a skirmish game, with the units splitting up and firing from separate locations. C&C:A is, in my opinion, a far more challenging game to play well. I really haven’t played enough of it, but I’d played just enough to utterly destroy Mick.

I was able to move my heavy infantry forward with their leader, and Mick wasn’t able to skirmish enough with his cavalry and archers before they were engaged and destroyed. Formations (lines) and leaders make C&C:A the game it is, although it also has a far more complicated set of pieces than M44 and BL. It certainly doesn’t have much terrain. Ancients combat tended to be on the flattest pieces of land the commanders could find, because their formations required it. (It’s been fun playing the more complicated games like SPQR and Chariots of Fire and seeing how they handle this).

Nash, Matt and I then played a game of Caylus, which was a first from Nash and Matt. As might be expected, they lost horribly. Caylus is a no-luck Eurogame and a very good one, but it’s a bit tough on the uninitiated, especially as I’m probably somewhere about 100 games of it. I’m not a really good player of Caylus, but I’m better than newbies.

By now, Sarah had arrived, so I got out Republic of Rome, which Nash, Matt, Sarah, Josh and I played. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time for a full game. We got in four turns out of a likely six. That was enough for me to engage in some really enjoyable deals with the other players: I’d support them for the consulships, if they gave my senator the Censorship *every turn*. Heh. It worked, too. Poor Josh was left out a bit, but Nash and Sarah benefited greatly from these deals. Unfortunately, Rome itself was in a very bad state with lots of unwon wars. We were rolling terribly, and facing massive problems. We survived the fourth turn (just), but I wouldn’t have been surprised if we would have all lost next turn!