Very interesting week of gaming with a busy session at N-BGC and a full saturday of Advanced Civilization.
N-BGC began with Qwixx with is easy to teach and play while eating. I enjoy it and it’s my favorite horse in the SdJ race which ends next Monday.
We also managed to get the Die Pälaste von Carrara on the table and played it with the advanced rules. This game is a nominee in the Kennerspiel des Jahres category and it should be right up my alley but I did not like it too much. As many Kramer Kiesling games are, it’s rather dry and abtract whilst having some interesting mechanisms in it. Production is gorgeous as Hans im Glück games tend to be but it just isn’t enough. I’ll give it another try but my hopes are not high.
The Hobbit Card Game found also it’s way on the table and we actually played it twice. Dark side as an advantage in the game I’m sure since I’ve yet to see good guys win the game. This is a fun trick taking game with a high chaos element in it. I’d like to see a variant where players know which cards are in the game.
23 was also an interesting revisit since I hadn’t played it since it came out at the Spiel fair couple years back. Many of these small Amigo card games are gems and so it 23 which is light enough to be fun to play with basically anyone but still offers enough depth that seasoned gamers can have fun time with it.
We ended the N-BGC session with two games of Hanabi. Hanabi is an excellent cooperative deduction card game which is a nominee of SdJ. It has very unique feel in it and I love deduction mechanism but still I feel that Hanabi is a bit too thinky to win the SdJ. Newertheless it’s definitely finding it’s place on my table in the future too.
On Saturday we had a 8 player game of Advanced Civilization which is one of my favorite games. I had the pleasureto be Illyria and obviously had high hopes of winning the game. Advanced Civilisation is an experience and an epic game which punishes the players throughout the game severely.
We had a very close game which in the end went to Africans played by Tuomas. His a veteran player and it wasn’t a big suprise that he won. I ended up being 5th which was a slight disapointment but I still enjoyed every minute of it especially because I was just couple hundred points behind the podium positions. It’s sad that I rarely have time for Adv Civ nowadays but I’ll gladly play it when I find the time for a long game.