Sunday Games Club - Orbiter, Fiefdoms and The Last Council

For a change, I went along to the London Playtest meet-up at the Jugged Hare pub near Victoria Station:

It's a nice pub! The group was upstairs and is unusual in that the games played have not yet been published.

Fiefdoms

This is the first of two games by Adam Taylor.

It's a little board game with dice dictating which row and column you can place either workers or armies (the little man figures borrowed from Carcassonne, called "meeples"). Armies can attack one-another and the game ends when someone runs out of armies to place. You win by the points you've scored placing your pieces on certain tiles. A nice little game and easy to play.

Orbiter

Another game from Adam, this was a card game with robots. The robot cards are arranged in a grid, with a planet card in the centre. An indicator circles the planet controlled by a 4-sided dice:

It was a really fast game, over in a few minutes, and fun to play. The point scoring was a little complicated, however (maybe a problem if it's aimed at kids), and one of the players couldn't make a move on his first turn, which seemed a little dissonant. These were minor quibbles, though, and it has real promise. Adam runs a small web site which publishes games for download.

The Last Council

After a small break, and a shuffle around, I played The Last Council designed by J.P. Treen.

It's based on a post-apocalyptic local council meeting (a certain amount of black humour is involved) with the players battling dwindling resources as well as each other.

J.P. said that each time he'd had it play tested he'd had to alter it and it is quite a complex game. It's quite a good game when you get going, but play was cut short by discussions about the game itself. Shame.