Monday, September 12, 2011

Lancaster



I've received the games mentioned as the prize in my previous post. If I was a more frequent blogger (sorry) I would have told you all about them. Maybe I'll get to that. Anyway, I've been busy punching and bagging and reading rules.

Lancaster is one of the games with rules in German, so I printed out the English rules from BGG. Last night when I was reading them I didn't have a translated bits manifest, so I was trying to match the HUNDREDS of bits to their German description. There were a few things I couldn't understand, but it was pretty obvious that all the red bits went together, all the green bits went together, and so on for the five player colours. However for one component there were bits in 4 player colours, and not the 5th.

I figured I'd lost it in the sofa when we were punching it (my sister is a very vigorous bit-puncher) so I went and pulled all the cushions off the sofa. I found two pens and a scrunchie, but no purple castle. So I went to the bedroom where I'd previously tried to read the rules but fallen asleep, and searched in the bed. Not there either. So I went to the game room where I'd say on the sofa to do the bagging, not there either. So I looked for the sprues, to see if we'd missed something. The sprues were in the garbage, and the bag they were in seemed to be full of oil, so the sprues were all oily and tangled together with the world's most annoying teabag. The purple castle wasn't there, and as far as I could tell there was no place it had come from, so maybe it didn't exist at all. However it was really quite yukky searching oily teabaggy sprues.

I gave up, and spent quite a long time washing my hands and went back to reading the rules. When I got to the special two-player rules it mentioned that each player takes two of the small castle mats... that was when I decided to look at BGG for a parts manifest. Indeed, there are only 4 small castles, in 4 of the 5 player colours.

In any case, it looks like a decent game that probably won't run too long. Right now, I think I need to go wash my hands again.

4 comments:

Pawnstar said...

Ha ha ha ha!
Reminds me of that story some chap told on BGG about his "friend" putting an odd counter out of a wargame into his stuff. Poor fella spent days (might have been weeks) trying to find which game was missing a chit; his friend only let him know when he was suitably frustrated!

I am very interested in this game; let me know how it goes.

Friendless said...

Have you played Evo or Amun Re, where the auction phase involves pushing off spaces? It's like that. There's also some brinkmanship and some gazumping. It's one of those games that goes for several hours and you call each other bastard a lot and in the end someone wins because someone has to. There's no secret cunning plan that will have your opponents astounded at how well you played.

Pawnstar said...

Disappointed then?

I've got too many games like that already; I also have a copy of Peter Hawes' take on the War of the Roses, and have yet to try that, so perhaps I don't need another game about that either.

Thanks for an excelent synopsis.

Friendless said...

It's just not my style. Peter Hawes is a good friend of mine, but his game's not my style either.