Boardgame session: 14Jan18

A very quick report. We started with a couple of games of Azul, and as expected the game scales well from our previous 2 player games to a 4 player count. All the challenges remain, the game play is still fast, the only change is that tiles re-circulate more often. Interestingly, we did manage to get the +10 point bonus for having 5 identical tiles a number of times, which did not seem likely when only 2 players are playing.

  

We went on to play 2 games of Citadels. This is a classic game which I had never played before, but I found a copy in a charity shop and this was its first outing. The rules are so simple and the objectives equally simple. The ‘twist’ is the character selection phase when you need to plan for your turn. The highest ranked character is the Assassin, which is a mean card potentially eliminating another player from the round. I seemed to be hit with this many times! The Robber also seems mean, but players rarely held significant money for it to be effective. I don’t think any of us fully utilised the Warlord card, paying hard earned cash to remove another players property with no benefit to the Warlord himself does not feel like value. The King can be useful, and I was always seemed to be to the right of the player choosing this role, which meant that when my character choice came round, I only had 2 to choose from (a bad situation). The games flowed well, we did not find it slow, and the results were close. We did not use the expansions which swop characters and add special buildings. I think all players enjoyed the game and character selection mechanism. We all felt there were further un-explored depths to this game. Maybe it deserves further outings, and it was certainly worth the couple of pounds I paid for it.