Thursday Night

I met with Iain and Duncan last night to play some games. We opened with Evo, a game that none of us had played. The setup instructions were a little confusing, but the actual game mechanisms were easy enough to comprehend and we were underway pretty quickly. My population of dinosaurs fell behind in the second turn and I was never able to bring it back, mostly due to my general failure to correctly position my dinos in suitable terrain. Some of this was because I was just bad at planning, but mostly because I just couldn't get any "leg" genes for my dinosaur species and consequently was more or less immobile. There was hardly any conflict between the players, possibly because we weren't that successful at maintaining a healthy population, and also because it wasn't until the final few turns of the game that anyone got a "horn" gene and was able to gain an advantage when attacking other players. Most of the interaction therefore centred around the auction round where new genes were obtained, and these worked quite well, with the nice twist of having to spend victory points to buy genes. With my reduced population I generated less VPs and had to spend most of them to obtain the leg genes that I needed and so ran in a distant third behind Duncan (2nd) and Iain.

Overall, it felt a little frustrating as you didn't really seem to have quite enough control over your destiny. It might work better with 4 players as more genes would appear and auctions would be even more keenly contested. If Evo was produced now I am sure it would have cool plastic dinosaurs for each player instead of wooden tokens. Then whatever the faults of the game you would have some neat figures to use in other games, or in dinosaur vs. meeple battles...

Actually when linking to BGG for EVO I see many of the images contain plastic dinos, I must investigate!

We finished with a somwhat shambolic game of Colossal Arena. Shambolic because it was getting late, and because I forgot that secret bets could only be placed in the first round, so nobody placed any, and finally because an accident of card placement led Iain to believe that the card values were the value of the bet and hence down a wild tangent of wresting control of a creature by playing higher value cards. Once we realised this, he quickly rectified matters by using the Daimon to place bets on various vacant spots, and stormed home the clear winner. The game plays quickly and would make a good closer to an evening. Each turn, especially at the end, there are usually 2 or 3 cards that you want to play and have to choose just one. Typical Knizia cruelty to players!