Equinox and paper locks

by Michael Janssen-Gibson

That equinox might have something to do with it, but it has been a tired week - students resting their head on the desk as soon as they enter the room, walking slowly through the days as I try to gather enough oomph for the next class, energy levels definitely on the low side.

The Laws of the Twelve Tables certainly proved interesting in class, a way of stepping outside ourselves and examining what these laws say about the people of Ancient Rome - what were their motivations and values that speak through the legislation. Fun stuff. But onto learning new rules for a different ‘world’.


a certain stillness

:nostar:

The first game was Pandemic Legacy Season 0. Fee has been hankering for a legacy game again, so she has committed her ‘large’ choice to this one for the foreseeable future. For a I-don’t-read-this-blog-very-often-what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about translation, it means we will be playing this game every three weeks.

We played the prologue, which gives you a faceless character with a pretty good power and sets you the task of managing the spread of the ‘red invasion’ whilst chasing down a couple of mystery locations in a Cluedo-esque process of elimination.

I won’t spoil any more detail, suffice to say we were down to the wire with meeting the objectives and really enjoyed the new mechanical twists that were introduced this season.

As usual with this game we do a lot of talking, so the play time really ballooned and I was imagining this might be the only thing to hit the table, but being determined to suck the marrow out of game night we pulled out the next game.

[o][/o]
don’t look if you want to keep everything about Season 0 secret - including the board.

:nostar:

Port Royal was next, including Just One More Contract. This time I really concentrated on the large-card contract conditions (normally I love chasing the base-game contracts), but it didn’t really work for me. Sos had some great money-earning characters and quickly shot to a big point lead, before I knew it he was declaring he had 12 points to my 7. With her final turn however, Fee collected a base contract and simultaneously met the criteria on two more of the large-card contracts, sailing from 9 points to a 15-point win. And I stayed on 7 points.


just one more round…please!

:nostar:

I thought we would need to call it a night at this point, but L.A.M.A Dice was set up before I could make my old-man-bloody-tired excuses.

This game was a great second-wind generator however, and can run surprisingly long if those triple llamas appear and keep knocking the scores down to keep players in the game.

This game gives Sos a severe case of ‘potty mouth’ as he curses the luck-gods and everyone else at the table. The final round was a corker, the dice kept producing utterly improbably results that skated around our card values and forced us to take cards from the middle. It was tense, as both Sos and Fee were one bad turn away from losing the game when I was suddenly favoured in my rolls and managed a triple-llama followed by my last card, ending both the round and the game, leaving me with only three points and a definitive win.


multiple high-value cards are the pits

:nostar:

Our in-class gaming afternoon is ticking along very nicely, though I need to find a double-period somewhere as most play are being cut off due to time constraints.

This week I brought along Heist for the students to play, some of them found it very stressful. I also set up a game of Carcassonne with one experienced students and two newbies, while I continued a game of Dominion with a couple of girls that really got into it last week. They are still at the stage of being excited by the hand-to-hand mechanics and chaining actions and buys, not really aware of a game arc or the need to transition to points. Not their fault, again the time is working against us, but it is fun seeing them wrap their heads around a new form of gaming with deck-building.


early game

Lastly it is worth mentioning the Phil Walker-Harding game Pass the Party Food that he kindly donated to my class. It is a cooperative game of blind-drawing food from a bag and assigning it to either neighbour or yourself, trying to create sets of unique or the same party food for (movement) points. Ziggy the dog is relentless, and keeps stealing food each round in an effort to catch up to the players. If Ziggy catches the players, they lose.

This is clearly the first cooperative game these students have played, and seeing them race to dibs the game and then chat and get excited/semi-stressed together is fantastic.


I found out after the photo that they didn’t win, this was set up for me.

:nostar:

I’ve also managed three plays of Walnut Grove too, it’s super-tight decision space and sub-30 minute playtime make this a solo sweet-spot. I am quite keen to bring this to the group now to add the wrinkle of competing for spaces on the main board.


I need more yellow

Origami

I returned to modular folding this week, I needed something predictable yet occupying. Here is my latest Tomoko Fuse (re)creation.




This is a modular model where the unit if folded the same way, but the paper size varies. The effect is quite striking.


flower

Thanks for reading.