The New Old

Some new and some old this week for the eight that managed to get through the weakening snow to hit the pub.

Both Pete and Sam brought Tzolkin along, the still hot, fairly new game from last year. Constraining play to just a single table of Mayan goodness, Pete setup his pimped up painted version for himself, Nicky, Matt and Sam.

Sam proceeded to have a bad game, and even after awarding himself a house ruled 30 points for ending the game with the start player token managed to not win. Nicky, the only player new to the game brought in a much more respectable score, with Matt ahead, and Pete in a comfortable leading position.

The second table with Rich, Fletch, Moritz and myself was content to play some of the old - first up a fairly quick game of Chaos in the Old World, followed by an equally quick outing of Hansa Teutonica.

New to CitOW Fletch landed Khorne - which is probably a good choice for someone not familiar with the game. Khorne with its straight forward kill as many units as possible and try to cash in elsewhere approach leads to a direct combative strategy. Rich got the difficult to handle Nurgle, I got the tricksy Tzeentch, and Moritz the elitist Slaneesh.

Taking a bold lead Rich brought forth his greater daemon as his first move, which was promptly isolated by my first card. This elicited a polite appreciation of my low cunning from Rich. And some sort of archaic finger sign language.

Moritz then proceeded to dance around the map consistently blocking battles and stopping Khorne from snacking on the juiciest of targets and soon took a commanding lead.

With a quick city ruination in turn two, and in three and four, things moved along at a fast pace. Rich and myself fell to squabbling over domination, his ugly vomit demons challenging my comfy corner, whilst in revenge my greater daemon showed up in spectacular form to eat all of his cultists in another region.

A few final desperate attempts to stop the ever more powerful Moritz failed, and Slaneesh romped to a win, Tzeench second, Nurgle third and Khorne in fourth, Moritz marking his first win of CitOW with an impressive flourish.

Hansa Teutonica was up next, the game devolving into an action fight very early on. Seeing the way things were going I cashed in on the action frenzy, and started earning points for everyones greed.

Netting some 15 or so points just from the action track proved hard for everyone else to beat, as no one else was really earning in game points and the game was threatening to finish fast. This kind of surprised me - the game almost lacked its usual multi track subtlety and fell into a primitive I WANT ACTIONS newbie kind of strategy. Perhaps we missed Pete and his cunning Hansa ways.

Rich quickly stitched up the point scores, almost getting a full house of all four, but I ended the game before he could finish it - and with absolutely bugger all else on the board his point total fell short. After a final tot up of points I had won in good fashion. Poor Fletch, somewhat bamboozled by Hansa's study of confusion garnered a bare dozen points, noting that it was only towards the very end of the game that some of the pieces of what was going on clicked. Such is Hansa.

I had managed a nice Hansa win - whilst being action count inferior for a reasonable portion of the game. Always good to pull off.