Fiona was away again this weekend, but this time Bekki, Tony and I managed to get ourselves organised, and they come round for games on Sunday evening.
We start with a few hands of Flea Circus to get us in the mood. I win the first, Bekki wins the second when I call the gala show early but with poor cards, and I won the third. Over the three games Bekki actually has the highest score, but the rules don’t mention adding the scores, so I win 2-1 I guess? Either way Tony’s last.
After that we’re ready for something more serious, except Bekki wants to play something not too difficult that we’ve played before, cause she’s not feeling up to anything harder (I think she might have got a bit too much sun during the day). We settle on Lord of the Rings with the Friends and Foes expansion. I get out the Lord of the Rings box and then leave the room to make some more tea.
When I get back a few minutes later I find they’ve got as far as taking off the lid, removing the main board, Sauron and the One Ring. That’s it! So I spend the next five minutes setting up the game, and explaining the Friends and Foes additions. We start with Sauron on 15 (as is recommended when playing with F&F for the first time), Bekki is Frodo, I’m Sam and Tony is Pippin. Merry and Fatty get left behind again.
We failed to complete Bree, mainly because we had trouble avoiding get overrrun with foes after some [][] roles on the dice. We avert a complete disaster though, as I have a surfeit of Hiding Hobbit cards, so we are actually able to pay the 7 Hiding required to avoid @@@ on the final event. (Going straight from the Shire into a game board feel really weird the first times you play F&F – you’re so used to having Rivendell goodies when you face the first board in the regular game).
We just survive Moria, fleeing with the power of the Ring, just before things get too bad. At this point I as Sam, am incredibly corrupt (about 6 or 7) mainly because I keep taking damage to kill foes (I’m Sam after all so it seems best I do it), whilst Tony as Pippin has barely been corrupted at all.
During Isengard our plan is to clear out the Foes so we can skip Helm’s Deep & hopefully Shelob’s Lair. Killing off the foes is easy enough, but requires a bit of thought to make sure you end the board with exactly none in play. You wouldn’t want one to appear on the last turn and be unable to kill it, letting all your hard work go to waste. We avoid any such mishap, and are able to skip Helm’s Deep. This reveals four new foes, which Bekki, as the new Ring-bearer needs to kill off between boards to let us skip Shelob’s Lair as well. With the power of Gandalf’s Firestorm, this is achevied, and we skip Shelob’s Lair.
Coming into Mordor, nobody is looking too healthy, but we still have plenty of stuff left – enough shields to call on Gandalf several times, my power to cancel an event, and Bekki still has the OOO feature card in hand. It is apparent though that it would be trivial for us to gain a Military Victory – the four foes revealed when we skipped Shelobs Lair where the last four in the deck. I had mentioned previously that Military Victory was apparently too easy, and we all agreed that we would just ignore the foes for the last board (I couldn’t remember what the Black Gate card did exactly).
As it turns out we in fact have more than enough stuff to make it to Mount Doom, as we get most of the way and then I spot that Bekki can put on the Ring & call on Gandalf to take no damage and make the move four squares, which will bring her to Mount Doom, and the OOO card means she can’t die when trying to lob in the One Ring – so we win!
We end the evening with a couple of hands of Starbase Jeff. Supposedly this is a tile-laying / gambling game. It seems like it has some interesting mechanics, but fails to actually turn them into a game. That seems to be the conclusion of my geekbuddies as well, but a surprising large number of people seem to rate the game as one of the best from Cheapass (depending on your point of view that still may not mean much). Perhaps there is something there. Tony seems to always have it with him, so I’ll guess I’ll get the chance to find out soon enough.
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