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Nick
United Kingdom
Unspecified
Unspecified
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Last week my partner and I managed to get away for a couple of days for the first time in a long time. We disappeared to the south of England, to the New Forest, and stayed in a B&B, my backpack stocked with some portable games, just in case. I took along Hive, Battle Lines and Lost Cities, leaving behind larger fodder such as Agricola.
On our first evening we found a table in a local hostelry and found, in the pile of games there, something called Backpacker. We decided to give this a go and quite enjoyed it, even though the rules seemed quite complicated at first. Our first couple of plays ended in a win apiece, and it was only on the second evening when Katie really hit her stride, beating me 2680 to 2340 over two rounds (“years”) in the first game, but going on to destroy me 4620 to 2000 over three rounds in the second. We found this game fun, if light, and, rather unsurprisingly given her success, Katie would like us to add this to our collection.
We spent a good couple of sessions in various places playing our other three games, only Battle Line sometimes being difficult to set up on a small pub table. With this game we were twice approached by people who asked us what we were playing. First it was a Dutch couple, who knew of Carcassonne and Catan, and were intrigued by the game; the second query came from an American girl whose boyfriend had only just encouraged her to play chess with him…without telling her that he had played at county level while still at school!
Having played the Schotten-Totten version described here for a while, we ‘upgraded’ to the full version, only later finding out that we had misinterpreted the instructions for the Tactics cards. This meant effectively that they were not used, but we still had some very tight games, playing over three rounds. Katie won two matches to my one, the first going 10-4, 10-4 (one win each) and the third going 13-10 to Katie as I fought back from a 5-0 drubbing the in first round.
We also brought out Hive, whose travel bag makes it an ideal portable companion, for the first time in ages. I have wanted to play this again for a while, and this trip seemed like the ideal opportunity to play it. We enjoyed this very much, and I managed to pull off a surprise victory at one point by moving my ant to a position where I could shift my grasshopper to the other side of Katie’s queen bee, setting up the win. The ant move confused her a little, which opened the gate for the victory. Here we played a best of 5 (3-2 to Katie) and a best of 3 (2-0 to me).
And lastly, Lost Cities. We found this to be a quickfire play, once we had settled into the rhythm, and, after a little misunderstanding about the scoring, this became a tight and popular diversion. In comparison with Battle Line, which can involve some quite intricate decisions, I like the relative lightness of this game, although it is still quite tactical. This ended up being our most played, as we got through four matches of three rounds each. I came out tops here, winning 235-137, 152-135 and then 152-82, while Katie’s victory came with a 223-161 scoreline. These matches swung back and forth, and there was always the possibility of a last gasp victory if somebody made an eight-card expedition.
We didn’t just play games, of course, but these added significantly to our break. There is a post somewhere on BGG under the title “How board gaming saved my marriage”, or something similar. Well, thankfully my relationship doesn’t need saving, but both Katie and I find the time we spend facing off over the table to be deeply satisfying, both in the intellectual tussle and in the quality of the time we spend together.
To sum up, then, we found Backpacker to be a light and frothy diversion, and the other three games all to be a step up in terms of complexity and tactical nous. Today we play Battle Line properly for the first time, and our next holiday, for a much longer time in August, will see yet more gaming.
(N.B. This is a repost from earlier today)
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