This week we played Ken Follett’s World Without End. It’s the follow up to his Pillars of the Earth game. World Without End is a resource managing game played over four chapters each with 6 game rounds. At the end of each chapter you must pay a certain number of resources: two food, two piety markers, and from 2-5 pieces of gold. With that in mind you also want to gain victory points. You do this by supplying building materials to various construction projects and by helping the victims of the McNeal plague. The beginning of each round also has an event that must resolved and gives everyone the opportunity to gather more income or resources. There is a dazzling array of high quality bits that come with the game. We like bits.
The game box says the game should run about 90 minutes. Ours ran about two hours. One interesting dynamic of the game is how you choose your action each round. You have 12 actions to choose from and each round you must choose one to preform and one to discard—meaning you won’t be able to do the discarded action even if you want to later. This happened to all of us in the last chapter of the game. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
For most of the game, Owen and I led, while Ben and Mike lagged behind a bit–Mike lagged a little further back than Ben. This changed as we came down to the final chapter. Ben moved up to challenge Owen and I for the lead, while Mike moved up into our same scoring zip code. As the game ended Owen was able to hold on to the lead with 58 points, I came in second with 55 points. Ben was nipping at my heels with 53 points and Mike turned in a respectable 48 points.
Next we played the Back to the Future card game by Looney Labs. In the game you play one of the descendants of one of the characters from the movie. Someone is messing with history again and you need to stop them before you are wiped out of existence. The “someone†is all of the other players. In the game you get an ID card stating who you are and what the timeline should look like for you to win. After you get the timeline looking like it should, you’re last act is to go back and un-invent time travelling.
The timeline (rows of cards) include linchpin cards and ripple points. Linchpins are significant moments in time that affect the ripple points associated with it. By changing the linchpin (flipping the card) the ripple point cards associated with it flip also. The game is filled with all kinds of cards allowing you to travel back in time to change these linchpins—maybe too many cards. The game is supposed to run from 20-60 minutes. Ours went 90 minutes and we were glad when it finally ended. Not so much because the game wasn’t fun, but because over and over again you would get close to you goal only to have some other time traveling nincompoop (another player) ruin it for you.
Next week is the finale of the Pirates game that Ben has been running for us.
Chaos Steve