Our board game club session yesterday started a bit slowly, with only four players present for a long time. However, that was really not a problem, because four people is quite enough to play good games and more gamers trickled in during the afternoon.

My first game was a two-player match of Crokinole. It was far from good play, but I managed to win both rounds. During our game, one more player came, so we could move on to three-player games next. Our choice was Coloretto. We played two rounds, I won both of them. The last one was particularly close, as the scores were 36-35-33.

Then we could finally get to the serious games. Because I have spent several hours on Patrician 3, I was quite eager to play the best board game representation of the era, Kogge. As it was my second game, I had some clue regarding what to do. Others were definitely a bit lost. However, I did not win. I did a nice little maneuver, when I moved to Tönsberg and traded for a bunch of ore (eight, I think). Next turn Guild Master moved there, so I didn’t leave the town. Instead I got myself a bonus chit and then raided the town for another pile of ore and some furs. Unfortunately my large fortune was later stolen.

It was an exciting and close game. Ari built two new offices, while the rest of us didn’t care too much about offices… In the end (we had Guild Master end the game), we had pretty much the same amount of points from Raid markers, bonus chits and offices, but Ari had most goods so he won the game 91-80-80-78. I like the game a lot, it’s very exciting and complex so it requires some serious thinking. It’s a cool game and I seriously wish a major publisher would pick it up, streamline the rules a bit and publish it with more glamorous components.

After one heavy game we started another with the same crowd. I was really eager to play Funkenschlag and fortunately the others didn’t mind. Last time the game took us two hours, this time it was closer to three. However, it didn’t feel too long, so that was fine. It was a curious game. People were very reluctant to start the second stage of the game for some reason so that when it finally happened, the third stage began in the end of that turn. So, we didn’t really have the stage two in the game.

It was certainly quite interesting. Ari was in the lead most of the early game. Robert got best location, however, with access to plenty of cities. In the stage one, he built an extensive network, full of almost-connected cities. I think he connected about five of them during one round after the stage two had began. I got left a bit behind, for some reason. I don’t really know what I did wrong, but the results were clear: when Robert finally connected to 20 cities, Ari was able to do the same. Both provided power to all the cities and thus the victory went for Ari because he had more money. Erkka connected to 18 or so, while I had just 16. Shame, but the game was great fun nonetheless.

After that I had time for just one quick game. I got two players with me to play Scream Machine. My opinion is getting quite clear there. The game is fun, but limited to three or at most four players. With six players, the counting of opponents’ cards gets too heavy (or then you have to play blind). With three players, it’s reasonably good fun. Scream Machine could be fun played with a good computer interface, so that one could immediately see the values of other players’ parks.