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Dune and Settlers
After mamoth sessions of Civilization it was decided that the Monday gaming day would focus on something that wouldn’t take 12 hours to play.
So we kicked off with Settlers, which I’d never played before, and all in all is a very simple game to play, but potentially not so easy to master, we manged to get in 3 games in about 3 hours, all the games were very close with at least two players lined up to win on the turn someone else won. In the last game I think Wuffy spent three turns waiting to win but never got the rolls he needed and then some cruel British guy snuck in and snatched victory from his grasping hands… sad…very sad.
Then we moved on to Dune (an Avalon Hill game from 1979), a game that is said to last around 3-4 hours. And maybe it does with 6 players, but with 4 we got in 4 games in 4 hours, which was very fast considering no one had played it before and we had to learn the rules, screw them up and then fix them again. The game has a “Game of Thrones” feel to it, but differs radically on how alliances work, very formal, and public, not “direct” back stabbing.
What we did find alarmin was that House Harkonnen won all three of the first games, so we dropped them in the fourth game and that was briefly won by the Guild (Chris S) and Bene Gesserit (Chris S..from Canada), until the Gessirt revealed they had predicted a Guild win on turn 4 and snatched victory from my grasping hands.
That gave Canadian Chris two wins he won game 3 in two turns with House Harkonne.
It’s a very nice game, with no dice, every faction has special abilities and special alliance powers which make playing each faction very different. Will be fun to try this with 6 players. Lots of optional rules that we didn’t try yet too.