Pirats, The Dark Titan and Circuses

Seven of us were there for the start so we had 2 warm up games going, table 1 went with Love Letter a nice game of deduction.

Our table went with Pickomino also known as Heck Meck a nice dice rolling game where you are trying to collect worms on tiles (victory points).

End scores in a 3 player Heck Meck - sometimes the dice do not roll favourably

End scores in a 3 player Heck Meck - sometimes the dice do not roll favourably

It is interesting to note that this was (from my memory) the first game played at the club and it is the clubs first anniversary this coming week.

Table 1’s next game was Sewer Pirats, the game is about collecting treasures, however the crew of the ships collecting the treasure are rats and their treasure is the flotsam of the sewers.

The three boats

The three boats

On a turn players play cards from their hand to place one of their pieces onto a ship or advance one of their crew on a ship or even take the captaincy of a ship at which point the ship sets sail and collects the flotsam in front sharing the treasures among the crew.

Some of the miniatures

Some of the miniatures

The game played quite nicely and all enjoyed it and it certainly has some cool miniatures.

My table went with one of my favourite resource management games Drum Roll the theme is that each player is running a circus and through putting on shows collects victory points these are earned in-game as well as through game end bonuses.

Some of the performers

Some of the performers

Every player has 3 action tokens which they place on various job roles on the central board. Actions are to sell tickets (collect cash), collect equipment (coloured cubes), seek investment (take an investment card), hire a performer or hire personnel.

A sample of additional personnel in Drum oll

A sample of additional personnel in Drum oll

It is the performers that the game mechanics are centred around, each one can be of five different types Animal Tamers, Acrobats, Jugglers, Magicians or Bizarre (eg Fire eaters), they all bring different types of bonuses to your circus and earn you victory points, the downside is that they must all be paid when it comes to putting on a show (there are 3 shows in each game), fortunately after you collect the bonuses. Each performer has 3 levels of accomplishment, each level is bought by using the equipment cubes, when a performer reaches level 3 they may be flipped to become a permanent performer.

A sample of the Investment cards

A sample of the Investment cards

When you flip a performer three things occur, first you collect victory points for that performer, secondly you lose the abilities of that performer, thirdly their costs drop to one and they remain with your circus for game end scoring. Overall I really like the tightness of the game with cash and resources and it is certainly very colourful.

Table 1 had moved on to Castle Panic with The Dark Titan expansion, if you have not played Castle Panic it is a good fun co-operative game whereby the players defend a castle against the advancing fantasy hordes, the mechanism is so popular that there are 2 further spin-offs Munchkin Panic which includes collecting treasure cards and Dead Panic where the players fight off zombies, all 3 are stand-alone games.

The walls still standing at Castle Panic after some lucky tile drawing

The walls still standing at Castle Panic after some lucky tile drawing

Meanwhile Castle Panic ’s second expansion has just gone on sale with Wizards Tower being the first has just released its second expansion The Dark Titan. The new monster is a double sided counter with 8 hits, the biggest monster in the base game was a 3 hit Ogre, so the Dark Titan is fairly powerful.

The Dark Titan in Castle Panic

The Dark Titan in Castle Panic

The game played at Table 1 went very well for the players, the attacking monsters are drawn from a bag at random and in their game the drawing timed perfectly with the combat cards they had in hand which meant when the Dark Titan came onto the board all other foes had already been vanquished allowing them to deal with him fairly easily. I have found that Castle Panic has a nice balance between fun and tension and I recommend that anyone into fun games should give it a try.

Table 2 finished off with Sushi Go! ensnaring a would be leaver to stay for “just one more game”. It was a good evening of gaming and for me it was nice to play Drum Roll as it had been about a year since I last played it.

Last weeks quiz photo was Cloud 9, an excellent brinksmanship game, there are 4 colours used in the game and cards to match, the photo was of three of the cards, green was the missing colour. This weeks quiz photo is from a game over 20 years old, see if you can get it without the aid of a search engine.