Rich bought his horned rat. His horny, horny rat. It’s an expansion for the much loved Chaos in the Old World, if you must ask.
The Horned Rat expansion adds a fifth player in the form of the Skaven and their verminous god the Horned Rat. The new faction plays slightly differently to the other chaos gods as it doesn’t place corruption on the board, instead the Skaven can score points when a region is ruined by placing unit’s in the region, where each unit counts as a corruption token; thus piggybacking the other players hard work. By not directly adding corruption the game is still balanced, but the fifth player still interacts with the ruination process – and is encouraged to throw units into contested regions. The Horned Rat player also has manoeuvrability and sheer weight of numbers on their side, so is a tricky prospect for the other powers. However, the four original factions have not been overlooked and benefit from new decks of power cards and upgrades.
In our game, Phil was honoured to draw the horny rats. Rich was Slannesh, Lovely was Nurgle, Ryan took Khorne and I was the magical Tzeentch. Unfortunately, we were slow to get going and time conspired against us. By 11pm I was within 1 point off the 50 point wining total, but was pegged back by Phil who stopped me crossing the line by re-arranging his clan rats - moving them into the ruined region and denying me four winning points. We wrapped it up there, but both Punk Rich and Phil were due to get the winning dial clicks on the next turn, with Phil being in a superior position. So a win for the Horned Rat, but a very close win, which leads me to believe that Chaos in the Old World is just as good with five as it is with four, but takes slightly longer to play. Huzzah!
Banished to the other table were Tom, Stu and Luke. They played Java, the second game of the Masks Trilogy. This a real beauty of a game with thick and satisfying tiles. It’s also, like most action point games, a bit of a thinker. Luke took victory with the most fame points at the end of the game.
Beer: This is the only bit that Tom enjoys so I’d better keep it up. I had two new beers and I can’t remember their names or the brewery names. One sounded like it was from New Zealand and one had something to do with Coopers, but not the Australian Cooper’s. Both were weak, pale, refreshing, but ultimately bland. I rate them both a five.