What's been going on?

The quick answer is - not a lot :(

No board games on the last three Sundays due to re-enactment events and a wedding. Hopefully as we move into autumn these interuptions will become less common.

I haven't been able to make the last two weeks of Blood Bowl either, due to commitments on Thursday. The week before that the games started late and I ended up abandoning my game at 11:35pm after turn 7 of the second half. We had to rush the second half just to get that far, and after a TD had been scored I just didn't have the time to play a pointless turn 8 and do the post game stuff. I only went to make (I thought) make up the numbers - as it turned out there was an odd number of players - so to be honest I'd rather not have bothered. The league should be moving back to the normal venue next week, were games can start much earlier again.

It's been such a drought recently that I actually got persuaded to play some Vs a couple of weeks ago. It was okay, but nothing special. Now that Tony has got a set of Enemy of my Enemy (the strongest search card in the game) in many ways the game seems to have moved away from what made it so interesting to me in the first place.

Back when the game started the emphasis seemed to be on combat between the characters - deciding formations and attacks, and how to best utilise your plot twists to get KOs and breakthrough. It many ways it had managed to transfer the gameplay of limited MtG (which is normally much more interesting than constructed MtG) into a constructed format whilst improving it. There were problems with some games being blowout to a player not drawing enough, or the right characters but I could live with that.

In the last few sets the amount of deck searching that is available seems to have reached a ridiculous level, so that now games seem to involve searching your deck for the answer you need to trump the other guys deck. Possibly UDE realise this - one of the preview cards for Heralds of Galactus seems to be a playable extract effect (search your opponents deck and remove a card).

I've played some two-player Puerto Rico on a couple of evenings. Had a couple of games against Matt, the first of which I won easily, then in the second I tried some slightly different tactics, that caused me to fall behind early and I wasn't able to make up the deficit. I enjoyed those games and managed to persuade Fiona to play a couple of games a few days later. I won the first easily as well, and then in the second managed to make a complete hash of the opening turns and fall miles behind again! This time I was able to comeback and win, although Fee missed a move on the closing turn that would have left my large building unmanned. That would have been enough for her to win, but she was tired and didn't spot it.