More Boardgames

This weeks gaming round-up....

I played a couple of games of Command and Colours: Ancients down at Guildford with Mike.  We had the whole game apart from the actual rules so we had to wing it slightly and come up with a random selection of infantry and cavalry and make up solutions for any complicated situations!  Luckily neither of us are too 'gamey' and weren't bothered by this.

We managed a couple of games in the evening: as neither of us had played C&C for ages the first game was very much a reminder of how it all worked and I managed to steal a victory by the subtle tactic of having my Elephant (I was Carthaginian so I had to have an Elephant) stomp all over some Romans and then charging  a Heavy Infantry unit and Leader straight across the board, killing everything in their path!

The second game was also pretty close but Mike had sussed out the dangers of Elephants this time and took Nelly out pretty quickly and I eventually lost by an honourable margin.

As predicted, my son and I also played a game of Twilight Struggle which spread over several evenings.  BoardgameGeek suggests a playing time of 2-3 hours...really!!??  The game went my way from the start with my victory points hovering in the teens for most of the game (first one to 20 wins) and my son, as the USSR struggling to keep up.  As usual he was playing a cunning game and I realised he was up to something in the last turn or 2...he'd steadily built up influence points across most of Europe, having sneakily checked the Victory Conditions.  If a player controls Europe at the end of the game they win, regardless of Victory Points...this is tricky to achieve but I'd been too preoccupied with Asia and S America and he snatched the game on the last turn!

I nearly bought Hammer of the Scots after reading about it on the Musings on wargames and life blog...it does look very appealing and I suspect it's only a matter of time before I give in and get a copy.  I'd popped into Orcs Nest in London last week after a meeting and admired the game.  I also came across "Labyrinth: the war on terror" which seems to be a game based on the Twilight Struggle system but focusing on the Middle East and Afghanistan in more recent years.  Looks very tempting but the subject matter does seem a bit bleak...reading reviews where people win by setting off a WMD in America doesn't sound the cheeriest of ways to spend an evening!