Lance's Birthday Games - Saturday 26 September 2009

Lance carried on his tradition of birthday games with more food than ever before. No-one got around to eating his ice cream cake! Jessi also had her own party while the cats hid.

There was a trend in the games played for 6 player games. First up was Steam. We played the basic rule set to Steam with the Southern England board from Age of Steam with 3 initial cubes per city. Leonie complained that she didn't know what she was doing, while I should have known what I was doing, but ran severely short of cubes. There was a general consensus that the game was one turn too long (we had severe rust belt issues).

Leonie 41
Travis 37
Peter  34
Craig  32
Lance  32
Ian    23

Next up was Expedition, which was new to Terri and Paulette. Leonie helped me to the win.

Ian      15
Lance    11
Paulette  5
Craig     5
Leonie    3
Terri     2

After the pizza we played Wildlife where Terri showed us how it should be done with super intelligent Mountain Crocs.

Terri  - Croc    88
Ian    - Eagle   78
Travis - Bear    57
Lance  - Human   56
Carl   - Snake   50
Nigel  - Mammoth 45

After sensible people went to bed, we finished the evening with Age of Empires III. Carl built lots of buildings and discovered plenty of new lands, Lance played a balanced game, Nigel ended up obscenely rich, I was very poor, colonized as much as possible and went to war (Lance deterred me with soldiers, Carl deterred me with his super-missionary and so I attacked Nigel).

Carl  103
Lance  99
Ian    80
Nigel  69

The tradition of the birthday person not winning a game on their birthday continues.

1960: The Making of the President (30-31 August & 6 September 2009)

I have quite a number of 2 player games that Anne and I play (plus a few multi-player games we play 2 player) but I realised recently that most of them are 15-45 minutes in length. So I started looking around for meatier 2 player games that might appeal to both Anne and I.

Research on Boardgamegeek led me to 1960: The Making of the President and Twilight Struggle. 1960: The Making of the President is a game about the US presidential election between Nixon and Kennedy while Twilight Struggle is about the Cold War 1945-89. Both of these games are based on the "card driven" idea I first came across in We the People (one of the few war games I enjoy). Basically there is a deck of cards (most of which have a number and an event), and the game is played as a series of hands. During each hand the players alternately play a card and either use it's event to do the corresponding special action or use the number on the card in some way, typically to gain influence somewhere on the board or reduce the opponent's influence. Each game has a randomising mechanism: in 1960 it is red and blue cubes drawn out of a bag, in Twilight Struggle it is dice. We found the games 3-4 hours long but Twilight Struggle has instant win conditions that can shorten the game considerably.


As both of these games are expensive I wanted to try them before making a buying decision. I noticed that Andrew Hubbard owns one and Andrew Rea owns both. Luckily, due to the generosity of both Andrews we got to borrow and try out both games.

We started this game on Sunday with the idea of this being a learning game of the first 2 or 3 turns, but then we carried on the next evening. This had the disadvantage as we hadn't read the rules to the debates carefully before we arrived at the debates. The debates were a bit of a fiasco as we had kept cards with our opponent's symbol on them! We made sure that didn't happen with election day. We also made a mistake of forgetting that media control trumps carrying a state. Which probably cost Anne a couple of cubes in NY (probably reducing me from 4 to 1 rather than 4 to 3). Anne won every initiative draw except for the one on election day.

Nixon (Ian) 307
Kennedy (Anne) 230

In our second game, Anne was Kennedy again. Early on she concentrated on the East and South and later the Mid-West by the mid game she had had a lock on those three regions. I/Nixon moved through to the East and took over NY and then started to attack PA.

Nixon (Ian) 283
Kennedy (Anne) 246