Lord of the Rings

Lucy and I had a Lord of the rings session on Sunday. First off with a game of Knizia's Lord of the Rings. This seems to be a challenge with two players. We have won it once out of about five plays.

It seems to me that there is a lot of luck in the order in which the event tiles are revealed. We cruised through Moria without much difficulty, but had a really tough time in Helm's Deep, losing most of our cards and incurring losses on the life tokens too. We entered Shelob's Lair without much expectation of getting through, but with help from Gandalf we made it out alive. We knew that Mordor would be too much for us after this and, almost straight after Lucy sacrificed herself for the ringbearer, it all came to an end at space 54.

Then a quick game of Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation. We both won while playing with the Fellowship players, but I had only two survivors and Lucy had three, so a win for her. We have found that the Fellowship player has won about two-thirds of all encounters so far. The two-game approach seems to work well in ensuring this is balanced out.

Power Grid

I was introduced to Power Grid on Friday. Chris and Janice and Christopher and Celine had played it a couple of times already and I was keen to try it out. It's ranked very high at Boardgamegeek and my tastes usually coincide pretty well with the popular views there.

First problem was that I missed most of the set up due to taking a phone call. This meant that by the time I got back to the table, there was an array of bits all over the place. I didn't have a lot of time to familiarise myself with all this and we were into the game. It seemed very much like a series of steps which didn't really interrelate or flow particularly smoothly. This is to some extent inevitable when you are learning a game that other players already know. Usually I get my hands on the rulebook when we're trying a new game, but this time it was a question of listening to the other players and following their instructions and hints.

It began to make sense but at some point when we all had around 5 or 6 cities, we decided, for reasons of time, to reduce the end of game goal to 10 cities instead of 15. This inevitably skewed the game, as it meant that different combinations of power stations were going to have an advantage against players' original plans. Chris and Janice both reached a potential maximum of 13 shortly after this and duly took the top two spots.

I found the game somewhat mechanical - too much do this, then do this, then do this. But I'll certainly play it again.