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Anthony Boydell
United Kingdom
Unspecified
Unspecified
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A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
Richard and I arrived as Carl was putting the final touches to a monumental chilli – a sprinkle here, a dab there, the careful clockwise scoop-and-stir motion. Carl’s recent infatuation with TV’s “Hells Kitchen” thankfully not extending to bellowed tirades of fishwife expletives and ladel abuse. I don’t care who you are, Mr Ramsay; call me a c*nt one more time and I’m going to stab you through the eye with this filleting knife.
Appropriately, the chilli and its accompanying dustdevil of spice would line our stomachs for an excellent evening of gaming: Dune (see what I did there?) followed by Power Grid: Benelux/Central Europe, by way of an iPad-based game of Battleship wherein I was utterly routed by a 10 year old: “You sunk my ego!”
Richard’s copy of Dune is an original and mooted to be worth a daft sum of dollars, so with oily be-sauced fingers we all ‘set to’ to the setting up. A minor heart attack was induced when I thought I was missing one of my tokens (minus 10 dollars) and, later, when Brendan (small child, seen-and-not-heard, nothing a sound thrashing wouldn’t fix etc) kept tapping his leader tokens against his mouth (minus 15 dollars – saliva is not a value-enhancing attribute to items of cardboard manufacture).
Amusingly, Richard had packed each set of components into ‘Bank coin bags’ – how delightfully ‘80s - and, yes, he has kept all the sprews from which the tokens had been ‘punched’ (+25 dollars, huzzah!).
The rules explanation was a little extended due to the amount of ground that needed to be covered (nice pun, Tony! - Thanks) and a constant dribble of pointless quips and banter from the rest of us BUT the game is – at its heart – a very simple one: put people on the board, move them about, fight and collect money (spice), use the money to by bonus effect cards and/or improve your fighting options. The first person/people (alliance) to control a number of key regions (the cities) is/are the winner(s). Thematically, its full-on integrated to Mr Herberts classic and satisfyingly so! My Imperial troops drop-shipped into a southern city and then, albeit temporarily, allied with the Harkonnen (who’d want to fight a guy with 8 trick cards in his hand?) before letting the Fremen, Atreides and Guild fight themselves into severely-reduced numbers and stealing in to take the requisite three cities (the timely arrival of a Sandworm allowing me to break my alliance and take the solo victory!).
It has that wonderful last century feel and I would love to play it again – it’s the stupidly intricate, doubled-sided (and reduced font-ed) player crib sheets that omit the REALLY IMPORTANT INFORMATION, the tiny cardboard chits and the daftly-custom combat wheels and player shields. It’s the playing time – we took nearly two hours and were five turns in to a game that nominally lasts for 15 turns! One for a late night session double-header with Cosmic Encounter, methinks!
Carl’s passive-aggressive suggestion that he’d ‘like to play Powergrid tonight or tomorrow night’ was voted a unanimous thumbs-up from the rest of us (Ray wasn’t here to grumble into his squash) and Benelux was arrayed upon the gaming table. I really feel like I’m beginning to get a handle on this game and, like a good cycle race, it’s seems to be about hanging back in the Peloton and then timing your breakout: oh, I can here people (Ray) lamenting the random appearance of Power Stations and being able to luck out / fall flat on the whims of the square deck, but that adds a necessary leveling factor IMO. The better players should always win, but there’s always room for a little good fortune to make things a little more interesting! Power Grid: Benelux/Central Europe is a good, quick map and everything resolved with Richard making/powering the 15 cities a round before Iain was going to make 17; I managed a (very) satisfying second place by powering 13 with others tailing off – all desperate for one more turn, but thwarted by Richard’s exact money!
As you would expect, the proceedings were liberally sprinkled with ‘sous entendu’, biscuit crumbs and good-natured abuse.
Gaming doesn’t get much better than this.
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