Heng’s Gaming Blog

Last friday I went to my ritual fortnightly boardgaming session. This time I was joined by my primary school friend ,Phuah, and his bro.

We arrived at Old Town Kopitiam Cheras (OTK) at 8.30 to find Jeff and Ainul engaging in a serious 2-player game of Caylus. Their game of jousting continued for awhile before Ainul wins it handily. Jeff then declared that he has yet to find a way to counter the apparently powerful building favor track (which Ainul was using), with the money and prestige points favor track.

However I felt that Jeff could have countered the building favor track by activating the lawyer and master builder instead to access the residences and prestige buildings. However things are probably not that simple since I *didn’t* watch the game diligently from start to finish.

Meanwhile, Alvin and Wong had started to arrive. After the Caylus game finished and was kept, we started Antike. With two games under my belt, I went for a more peaceful route in the beginning by building a temple to boost my gold production. The preliminary aim of course, was to go for the tech VPs. Ainul, Jeff and Alvin, being veterans, also went for tech VPs, but elected to get their gold from expansionism. Newbies Phuah and his bro, experimented with the temple building path while barbarian Wong tried for an early military strategy.

Now playing Antike requires some experience and experience shows that the first thing to do was to grab on the limited tech VPs before they run out. Next set of VPs should come from a mix of expansionism and temple building before scoring the homerun on the temple sacking VPs. Needless to say Phuah bros and Wong found out too late to be in contention for the game. Their strategy got them only so far before they found themselves stuck. Hopefully they’ve paid their learning dues and do better next time.

Phuah bros’ experiment of building too much temples was quite novel but stuck in the end of not having enough army to defend them. Wong on the other hand expanded too early and had not build up a proper support for his army generation (iron resource) and movement (tech).

From what I see, the early military strategy is quite hard to maintain. So far the numbers seems to be against this strategy.

Our game of Antike ended with Jeff grabbing the final VP for the win with myself close behind but delayed by one turn. Ainul and Alvin was in the middle pack while Phuah bros and Wong were in the last.

After that we played Alvin’s copy of Super Munchkin. A fun game, with elements of adventure and role-playing as players attempt to be the first Level-10 Superhero!

The multitude of card text to read initially threw us off a little, despite its reputation as a simple game. Some timing issues with the card play here and questions of card interactions put this game firmly in the category of thematic American-type game, rather than the mechanical driven Euro-game. The theme of superheroes challenging whacky super-villains using even whackier super-powers is well implemented and had us all laughing and having a fun time. Overall the response has been positive.

After this, we adjourned to BoardgameCafe to play Twilight Imperium III (TI3). To indoctrinate Henry in the varieties of TI3, we elected to use the old black bordered strategy cards (Henry played with the white strategy cards before). Every player was dealt two race cards in order to provide them with a choice. Jeff picked the dastardly Barony of Letnev, Henry went with the annoying Brutherhood of Yin, Phuah bros with the dreaded Lixiz, Wong with the multipurpose Winnu and myself the peaceful trading race of the Emirates of Hacan.

This being a gathering of eurogamers, we all diligently picked the Imperial strategy card when it was offered to us, followed by Initiative. Next popular was Tech and the rest is… just not so popular. I guess playing with a bunch of eurogaming-VP-chasing people is a bit different when playing with your own blood thirsty gaming group.

Conflict was pretty limited as players contented with building fleets rather than fighting. The Letnev, Yin and Hacan were the peaceful culprits as they attempt to arrange their pretty spaceships onto the vastness of the board space, contentingly shuffling them around in a maneuver reminisence of the China-Taiwan-US wargames: lots of dust but no shots fired.

Wong on the other hand tried to live up to his billing of a barbarian and his Winnu quickly cemented a pact with the Hacans, in order to turn on his other neighbour: the Lixiz. The Lixiz obligingly engaged in an early arms race, capitalising on his race’s advantage with dreadnoughts to bring up an impressive fleet of death dealing star destroyers.

The Winnu struck early and sent the Lixiz backpedalling. At one point, came knocking on Lixiz’s homeworld. Lixiz was forced to recall their mighty fleet to deal with the costly annoyance.

Hacans, being bored, took over Mecatol Rex even though his objective did not depend on it. Letnevs, emboldened at last by their painstakingly researched and built warsun descended upon Mecatol Rex and took over without batting an eyelid. Yin, goodness knows what they are doing, were having a whale of a time flipping their resource<—>influence using their racial ability and only elected to strike only when victory for the Letnevs were assured.

Overall, a rather conflict-free TI3 game that lasted 6 hours. We left at 7am in the morning… Nuts!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 9:56 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.