Thursday 8 November 2012

The games we played were mostly on the train

We all love train games, don't we? Railways of the World. Ticket To Ride. Decathlon.

What's that you say? Decathlon isn't a train game? Well, it can be if you're with the right people.

Since myself, Sam and Joe all needed to go to London by train today, we decided to combine our journeys. I brought along eight dice and the rules to Renier Knizia's Decathlon for our journey. Joe brazenly sat at an already reserved table, saying that they probably won't turn up and if they do, then we'll move. I was highly doubtful, but I was made to eat my words, as none of the four people arrived to take their seats. I was a bit appalled too. Such waste.

But it meant we had a table, so we could play Decathlon. First, Joe successfully identified the dice I brought as coming from Troyes. Remarking that Joe's in-depth knowledge of games had now reached uncanny proportions, we began.

This is a game of ten dice-based challenges. It's all about pushing your luck, and trying to guess if you should go for another role for a higher score, but risk losing everything. Last time we played it was at Stabcon, where we got quite a crowd watching. But commuters are a tougher crowd and no one paid much attention to our cries of despair or victory. In the end, Joe won by a large margin, with Sam just pipping me to second.

Then in London, Sam cajoled me into visiting the Orc's Nest, a small but irresistible board game shop in the West End. I chose the newly released Tsuro Of The Seas, to go with my homebrew version of the original. And then Sam looked at a board game, Divinare, which caught his eye with it's mock Victorian spiritualist design. I liked the look of it too, and after a quick look on BGG I decided to buy it too.

Sam was at first tempted by a dice version of Biblios, but was then swayed by the sight of Village, a worker placement game that currently lies just outside the BGG Top 100. Back at the hotel, we got out Tsuro Of The Seas, keen to learn how the monsters would change the feel of the game. It's still much the same game of survival, but now with certain squares that move around at random, threatening to swallow you whole. It was fun, but I can't help thinking it's ripe for some variations.



Sam then opened up Village, keen to give it a go, only to find that it needed to stickers attached to the meeples before the game could begin. I looked through the rules of Divinare, but found it hard to follow the flow of the game, so I decided further research online was needed before bringing it to the table. After Sam had finished his sticking, it was late and we decided to call it a night.

4 comments:

  1. I think I won Decathlon mainly because you both scored zero in the pole-vault (or was it the javelin? Maybe you were trying to pole-vault with javelins - no wonder!)
    Fun, though - I'm working on a collapsible dice tray for train use...

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  2. Decathlon was fun. I think Tsuro of the Seas is great too, with the small caveat of a lot of dice-rolling to be done. As Andrew noted, it's ripe for variants.

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  3. Can you play regular Tsuro with this version?

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