Rolling the stats for your character is always exciting, but can also be slightly disappointing if the dice betray you. On the bright side, having a character with a clear weakness does make roleplaying a lot easier! Or cut your adventure short if you end up with very few hit points…

We played a lot of games last week, but no role-playing games. The only one we’ve got coming up in our schedule is a game of Delta Green in a few weeks, so I should start reading into that and create a character. 🙂 The first games we played last week were Rival Cities and Tiger & Dragon. Rival Cities remains an elegant two-player tug-of-war game, and with its four winning conditions, it’s always exciting – if you keep a sharp eye on your opponent and what they’re doing! I’m still figuring out what the strategy is behind Tiger & Dragon. We’ve played it a few times now, and I think I know what I’m doing, but I’m wondering when it will really *click* with me. We still need to try it with more players and see how that changes the game.

Saturday was the big game day with our nephews (12 & 14) that we had planned since they really loved playing Sniper Elite the last time they were here. So, we started the day with Sniper Elite. That was fun! I somehow got away as the sniper while they had me surrounded in a small corridor. I even managed to reach my second objective on my last remaining turn. This was the first time I just stayed put in the same space for more than four turns because a figure was blocking the path, and they thought I had moved the other way.

Our nephews picked the next game and they clearly were attracted to the video game adaptations! We (finally) played the Age of Wonders: Planetfall game. “Finally,” because we have been trying to get this to the table with our friends. But somehow it never gets picked if we present a few options. The game is a really cool light tableau builder that looks more intimidating than it is. In turn, players pick a card from the central board and place their ship on it. If everybody picked a card (these can be pickups, landmarks, enemies, or science cards), everybody pays the costs (by either spending enough energy or strength points). Everybody gets to pick two cards during a round – there are seven rounds, so you’re slowly building your tableau, trying to score as many points and trying to accumulate enough resources to be able to pay for the cards that are getting more expensive as the game progresses. The theme and the game mechanics of the game really clicked with our nephews!

After that, they played a game of OnePageRules’ Grimdark Future: Firefight with Heinze and their dad. It turns out that it’s the perfect starting point for playing war games! The ruleset is free, you can play it with your own miniatures, and the rules are simple. Simple doesn’t mean boring or not strategic. A full 24 hours later, Heinze all of a sudden thought about what he could’ve done better during the game. Oh, they brought the coolest mission markers for the game: pidgeons miniatures!

Since we had to wait for dinner to be done, we played a quick game of Metrolijn (Voll Verplant). It turned out to be a difficult introduction to roll & write games, since it was mostly confusing for them – maybe a game of Ganz Schön Clever would have been a better choice. After dinner, they still weren’t done with playing games and demanded another one. We were OK with it as long as they picked a game that they knew the rules of. So… it was time for: Robot Quest Arena – always an absolute hit with them. The downside is that they never want it to end, so they play way too passively when they see the pool of blue cubes reaching zero. Oh well, sorry dudes, more points for us. 😉