ManGo's Gaming
— 'Cos Gaming Is Not Kidstuff! —
LPO Day 4: Well, actually…
Anyone following this series might be surprised to hear that Paul and I both woke before 8.30am on Thursday… he was already in the garden enjoying the morning birdsong before I got downstairs, but there’ll be no prizes for guessing what we played…
I don’t think I’d laughed so much in such a short period of time the entirety of the week… If you have young children (or even if you haven’t) you should really get a copy of Rhino Hero… so much fun in such a tiny box!
Next up, we decided to try out a new FlickFleet scenario I’d concocted the previous evening, involving three Star Destroyers facing off against each other, but neatly separated by a string of… wait for it… space rabbits!
To be fair, the rabbits represented space debris (an asteroid field), And the game itself proved a titanic battle of attack, hide, and counter-attack once we’d blasted/navigated our way through the space lanes…
I know a lot of people aren’t fans of dexterity games, but I genuinely like FlickFleet, and flicking dice and spaceships around is definitely something you get better at with practice…
We headed over and joined the rest of the LPO (Le Pas Opton incidentally, sorry!) gaming community and the first thing we chose to tackle was a game of Nusfjord which I haven’t had to teach for awhile, so despite a rocky start with set-up, we did finally get underway… At one point I thought I was going to run away with this, but Paul had smartly picked up the 11VP Castle tile and the 7VP ‘6+ shares’ tile in the previous round… Ahh well…
Next on the list for us was Rajas of the Ganges, a classic eurogame with elements of worker placement, tableau-building, a pretty river of goody-collection, and a delightful selection of dice manipulation spaces… all of which help to ensure multiple paths to victory and an assortment of workable strategies.
Round 2 of the Codenames tournament saw us enter the game full of confidence, only to then be handed our candy assess in a gift- wrapped sleeve of merriment and social innuendo… we were comfortably turned over and shown the door in double-quick time by a team who I hope will deservedly win the tournament.
After this, I got the opportunity to play Minty’s Bootiful Football Game a couple of times… the first game ended in a 1-1 draw after my team had led 1-0 for the majority of the game: a cunning late formation change by my opponent meant my team frantically scrambled to clear the ball from its defence throughout the latter part of the second half, only to be caught by a jammy Xtreme Success roll in the 87th minute that gave my opponent the equaliser!
For the second game I had a superior core team throughout and a fair bit of positive luck, which led to some one-way traffic and ultimately a thumping 3-0 win!
I also got the chance to teach a lovely couple how to play Azul, which I really enjoyed and proved strangely satisfying, especially given I only came second!
It was getting late now, so we returned to the chalet for more games, and given it was my last proper night at LPO, managed to get through 6-player games of Celestia, Fuji Flush, 6 Nimmt! and a 4-player game of Valeria Card Kingdoms before finally retiring at 2.30am-ish — this was definitely not a holiday of early nights and lazy mornings!
That all said, I’ve had a great time, and was particularly pleased to have played so many games with such a varied selection of people from all walks of life… and of course to have made lots of new gaming friends and acquaintances!
ManGo’s Gaming — www.mangosgaming.uk
ManGo's Gaming 