July 2023 meeting

Back to gaming in July, and a better turnout when we weren't competing against UK Games Expo!

We started off with three tables, playing Terraforming Mars (fully-blinged-out with all the expansions), Seas of Havoc (a game I'd never heard of and have no real idea of how it plays) and Heat (the current hotness); I was in Heat and was enjoying it so much I completely failed to take photos of the game set up!

It's definitely a successor to Flamme Rouge and I mean that in a good way. It's a bit more complex than Flamme Rouge, but I think the two games are different enough that you can't call one categorically better; sometimes you want a lighter game. Most of the complexity of Heat comes from hand management, working out when to accumulate Heat cards for a benefit on track and when to slow down on track to flush them out. It only took us a couple of turns to figure out how it all worked. A fun game.

After Seas of Havoc was a palate cleanser of 6 Nimmt then Flamecraft, while my table moved on to Mosaic. Meanwhile, Terraforming Mars was still going.

Mosaic was new to all of us apart from the game's owner. It's a big and open game of civilisation building, with a lot of options for how to proceed. One other player described the game as having at least five viable routes to victory, but us newbies didn't know any of them! Unfortunately for me, I did a very bad job of figuring out any of those routes and half-heartedly did a few of them. That meant I ended up being thoroughly trounced in the final scoring. Despite that, I had fun playing the game and would play it again.

That was near the end of the day so we wrapped up with a couple of games of Scout and 6 Nimmt.

Next meeting

Our next meeting is 12 August (all meetings are on the calendar). Please sign up on our Meetup page if you can.