Thursday 31 May 2012

Terra Nouveau

Starved of games for the past fortnight, I sent out the call for extra-curricular activities on Wednesday hoping enough people would feel sorry for me to make it a GNN night proper. Clearly I underplayed my "poor waif" hand though, as it was just myself and Andrew who convened, making it non-leaderboard. Did we care? Not a jot, as we broke out Terra Nova, my trade with a BGGeek in Venezuela, which took about ten weeks to get here.

I had hardly started in on the rules when Andrew noticed the uncanny similarities between the meeples and Wallace of Wallace and Gromit fame.


Is there no escape from their ubiquity? Anyway after the tickly rules and underwhelming gameplay of Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas (I couldn't even be bothered to blog my disappointment, even if I do like saying the name in the manner of a Gregorian monk in a particularly gloomy sulk) Terra Nova has an exceedingly simple and ingenious mechanic: After setting up (placing all our settlers on the board) you have three action points: The first must be spent moving a settler; as far as you like in any one direction. Then the second and third can be spent however you like between two options: moving a second (and possibly third) settler, and/or placing a fence adjacent to any settler you've moved.


That's it. The board is broken up into several terrains and scoring occurs when any section that contains three or less of them is fenced off. The most settlers within that area takes the points, or they are split if it's a tie. In this instance I rushed the endgame slightly, so I'll never know if I might have been able to eke a way past Andrew or not, but as it was he won in the tightest of finishes, 85 to 84.


I liked it. The early play is not as ingenious as the design, but it was an enjoyable battle of wits with an exponential ramping up of tension as the board closes itself out. And though it's to all intents and purposes an abstract I got the feeling we'd be more likely to play it again than Inka (which I liked but Andrew didn't) and the aforementioned Sator... which we both thought was crap. I could also see it coming out on a Tuesday once in a while.

After that we played 7 Wonders, and as with Terra Nova I made the early running only to find Andrew's long-game overhaul me, as he stared down my armies from his smorgasboard of blue buildings. *Mafiosi voice* I miss two weeks, suddenly I can't win a fockin' thing!

Here's Adam in those glasses:




8 comments:

  1. Which of the two photos is Adam? They both look like Wallace...
    Terra Nova sounds a bit like Hey That's My Fence!

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  2. Terra Nova is interested, but a little spoilt by neither of us knowing what we were doing for the first part of the game. But before long it reveals and interesting dynamic: it may be productive to give your opponents points if it means they lose more men than you. Deserves another go.

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  3. It's very Hey That's My Fence. That's how I explained it to Sally; we played it tonight with a couple of friends. Quite a chaotic board and start and more permutations to deal with, but good fun. To me anyway, Sally was less enamoured and thought it a bit unforgiving.

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  4. Doesn't that meeple look like Joe in his hat?

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  5. Hang on a minute. Have we ever seen Joe and Wallace in the same room?

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  6. Look at it the other way up, and it's a giant rabbit's head on a pogo stick.

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  7. Come to think of it, I've never seen Joe in the same room as a giant rabbit's head on a pogo stick, either...

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