This weekend we had that most traditional of British bank holiday experiences... torrential rain and the family trapped in the house. To complete the cliche we decided to round things off with a boardgame: something usually guaranteed to lead to arguments, tantrums and divorce!
Actually the game was my son’s idea... my wife isn’t a great game fan but has a knack of grudgingly agreeing to play, saying ‘I don’t really understand this’ and then wiping the floor with the opposition.
Elaine was lured into agreeing to this with the interesting selling point of “...at least it’s not Kingmaker”. Callum and I are great Kingmaker fans but games do have a habit of going on for days without coming to a resolution!
Callum suggested playing the Discworld boardgame which we’ve had a for a couple of years but only played a few times.. It’s a nicely put together game for up to 8 [I think] in which each player takes control of a leading Discworld luminary... in my case Lord de Worde, while my son was Lord Vetinari.
The board is a very nicely illustrated map of the city, divided up into regions... The Shades, The Dolly Sisters etc which each player attempts to control by having the majority of minions in an area. Cards are played each turn which can add, remove or shift minions around as well as allowing players to ‘buy’ areas which give a range of bonuses, gain coins or have some other more random effects. As minions are placed these cause ‘trouble’ markers to appear which allow assassinations to take place
Each character has their own set of victory conditions so a key part of the game is attempting to work out who is who, based on how they’re playing the game... unfortunately my son is a dab hand at this, and clearly my wife and I are far too easy to read, and had this sussed out fairly quickly [remind me never to play poker with him!]. My wife and I were each trying to gain control of 5 regions, and while I briefly looked as though I was going to achieve this, I was immediately stomped on heavily by a ruthless mother/son tag team. Callum meanwhile was steadily introducing Trouble markers all over the place as having 10 on the board is the victory condition for Lord Vetinari... I did work out what he was doing but sadly too late to do much about it and he claimed the victory.
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I like the idea of this game, love the books!
ReplyDeleteIt's a fun little game...not too long to play and plenty of opportunities to stitch each other up! The components and board are very nice too.
ReplyDeleteThat looks like a good game although I am rubbish at games. My wife has an innate knack for them (due to the huge experience playing games on endless wet summers trapped on a yacht off the South Coast), my daughter approaches them all like scientific experiments and my son gets bored if he isn't winning. I never get the hang of the rules until it is too late!
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