Sunday, February 8, 2009

February 7, 2009 - The Voyage Continues

Location: Yoda's House
Players: Yoda, Steve, MichaelP, MichaelU, Nick

Ah, Munchers - a good way to start the day...

To start the day, Steve demoed his two new game acquisitions - Kingmaker and Talisman. Everyone perused the game boards and paraphernalia, asked questions both answerable and unanswerable, and agreed both looked interesting for future sessions.

Next, we started Iron Dragon. Yoda laid out the game and explained the rules (most of them at least : ), prior to getting started. Everyone else was a newbie to this game. This became apparent relatively quickly when a couple of people found themselves in the situation of not being able to deliver a load. Due to inadequate explanations and demonstrations, MichaelU didn't realize that he only got to make each specified delivery a single time and was stranded pretty quickly when he didn't have enough money to build track to make a second delivery. At this point, he became a source of a stream of disasters, as he would throw away his cards every turn and get new ones. Disasters eventually pushed Nick (and very nearly two others) into the same situation. Steve was the only player not to have a very close brush with complete disaster. Eventually MichaelU did get a card which allowed him to deliver something and was able to claw his way back into active play. Nick got money from someone using his track and became active again, so no one was forced to sit out for a really extended period. Networks extended, money came and went, and a remarkable amount of cross-track usage fees changed hands.

The first game ended up lasting until 16:30, as learning such a game leads to much discussion, as well as longer planning and replanning activities as events unfold. By the end of the game (Yoda winning), everyone except MichaelU had connected seven major cities with a network. Everyone understood the mechanics of the game much better by the end, and during cleanup there was a lively discussion of things learned and what different strategies to employ next time. Expect this one to make more appearances in the future.

Unfortunately due to short time remaining, not even a short game was able to be fit in post-Iron Dragon.

Once again, photos courtesy of Steve (this time with a real camera!).

1 comment:

  1. That would be Talisman, 2nd Edition, the One True Talisman. :-)

    ReplyDelete