Last night at game night we played an unprecedented three (3) games! First we played Infinite City. Infinite city is a tile placement game where you build an ever sprawling city and then do your best to take control of it. Each tile has a set of instructions that you follow once you play the tile. Each player has colored tokens that they place on the tile to show they have some ownership in the tile. Multiple players can have their token on the same tile. There are three ways to score points. Groups of three tiles or more with your token scores you a point for each tile. Controlling the most “silver†tiles gain you a point for each. (We called the silver tiles â€barbed wired†tiles due the silver swirls at the bottom of each tile.) Lastly, some of the tiles actually have numeric values on them. Own the tile, gain the bonus.
In our first game, I was a strong contender for first place and had the game ended about 15 minutes earlier, I might have won. As it was, both Mike and Owen began building empires. At the end Mike had 20 points and Owen had 19. I was a close third and poor Ben, still suffering from last-place-itis, came in a distant last (7 points.) Â In the second game we were all pretty evenly matched (except for Ben.) Â Mike had a stellar first turn, but not long after Owen converted half the city to be under his control. The game continued this to and fro momentum until the very end. Owen ended up winning. Mike and I tied for second, and Ben (once again) was a distant forth.
The third game we played was Asteroyds. A space racing game where we are all piloting through an ever shifting field of asteroids and space gates. The winner is the first one to go through all four gates. You can hit the gates in any order. The game is pretty straight forward. You roll three dice, one for each color of asteroid, to see which direction each will shift. Then you hit the timer…yes, this game comes with a timer. For beginners, you get 50 seconds to figure out your six moves. Experts get 20 seconds. I can’t image anyone who can plan their turn in just 20 seconds. Ben was the first to make a major error, plowing through asteroid after asteroid when his planning went terribly wrong. It was a little while after that when we realized that hitting an obstacle stopped your progress. But the rules do say that you can make up your own rules, so we played the rest of the game as if you could plow through obstacles–still taking the damage of course.
I ended up winning the game. I had several very easy turns where the asteroids opened a path for me. Mike was looking to be number two except that to get to his final gate before Ben, he had to transfer the energy from his shields to his engines. This meant he took more damage when hitting obstacles. Mike needed to move through two asteroids on the way to the gate. Since they now did more damage to his ship, his ship was destroyed. Mike overlooked this during his 50 second planning session. Ben was an easy second, followed by Owen. We had mixed reviews on this game. I think Mike didn’t like it much. It reminded him too much of Roborally. Ben on the other hand wants to play it again to see how playing by the correct obstacle rules changes the game. I liked the game and will bring it every week to Mike’s house to play–unless of course he wants to play Roborally instead.
Chaos Steve