Game Night Light 27

This last Monday saw the return of weekly game night after a Covid pause.

We played my newly acquired game Sniper!

I haven't played this since high school in the original weekly game night.

The beer exchange resumed as well, naturally:

Both were good, but I honestly couldn't tell the difference between the golden lager and the regular one.

The game was fun, although we played the stripped down basic version of the game. Just firearms. Each side had a squad moving through the town on predetermined patrol paths until each side spotted the other. The German squad had one fewer man but three machine guns and four rifles. The Americans had more automatic rifles and machine pistols, but no machine gun.

The game operates on written orders and simultaneous movement. Thank goodness I have a personal photocopier/printer! Although 40+ years ago I bet we used plain ruled paper.

We each operated under misconceptions that affected our play. 

One, contrary to expectations, being in buildings and shooting out of windows or through doors provided no more protection than lying prone in the open. Of course, it takes a full turn to drop prone or stand up, so the aperture position was more flexible.

Two, we thought elevation mattered. Not in the basic game, really.

Three, the map actually represents a very small area. Even machine pistols could shoot across the entire board. We each assumed such weapons would be close range only. Oops. I still think even on the game scale that the machine pistols were over-rated. It just feels like they should be awesome indoors but less valuable for long-range. But no.

The German player figured getting machine guns in buildings with good fields of fire would be supreme. But the short range made a machine gunner shooting at a machine pistol equally lethal both ways. Maybe if the Germans had been able to keep the MGs well back the "longer" range would have made a difference. One would hope so given the hopeless nature of a mere rifle-armed soldier.

The American player wasted time trying to get soldiers up stairs to higher floors or roofs. And the higher chance of American troops panicking and just running about made it tougher for the Americans to really organize a push.

Both players spread out too much given the near impossibility of troops without body armor surviving any firefight.

And I do think the shooting was way too accurate. 

We wrapped up at 10:00 after just 4 turns of writing orders for shooting and moving in contact.

In the end, the Germans lost a machine gunner and rifleman (shot dead while trying to crawl to safety after being incapacitated!) while the Americans lost three machine pistol/automatic rifle troops.

 

It was easy to get into the basic game without the learning curve struggles of other games. But the full game with smoke, grenades, opportunity fire, and move and shoot rather than one or the other--not to mention the ability to go through windows and not just doors--would make it more interesting.

A worthy game that can easily be used for multiple players controlling just a fire team of 3-5 men. 

Oh, and I'm switching weekly beer exchange and game night to Thursday going forward. So the next warning email will be later in the week. I'm not even sure why I picked Monday. Thursday makes much more sense.

Game Night Light 26

Last night was the weekly game night and beer exchange.

First, the beers:

The game was Through the Ages. We played the simple game.

That's the main board above with all the cards you draw for different capabilities you can use; and markers for points in science, culture, and military power. Each player has their own board to keep track of people and production. In many ways this is a simpler version of the Castles of Burgundy game. And it reminds me of Scythe in some ways, although that impression is not based on playing the latter.

The game can be played by 2-4 players. You build your empire with technology, culture, military power, growing your population, and building up your government, agriculture, mining, and wonders of the world. At the end of the game you convert your assets to culture points and the player with the most culture points wins.

There is an events deck, which in the simple game just provides good things.

You have action points for civilian and military actions that can elevate your civilization. Your type of government can affect those points.

We didn't jump right into the game. And the learning curve was actually pretty rapid. We didn't know how you win until we got to the end of the game. And as we added up the points, we .... tied!

So that was interesting. We each had different means of getting to the same number of points. You do have to balance your limited actions to do a lot of different things. I for example, tied up resources making the Great Wall. Luckily I had a card that helped build it faster, freeing up resources more quickly.

Anyway, we both liked the game. I think we played this in a maybe 2-1/2 hours. It would be fun to try 3 or 4 players.