Session Report: Dave At Mine

On Wednesday Dave came round for a night of gaming. We had nothing in particular lined up, but Dave brought along his copy of Memoir '44 just in case. It seemed like a good choice for the evening so we set up the next scenario we had to play: Sword Beach - an amphibious assault. As usual we played both sides, I started as the Axis, defending the beach and then played the Allies in the second game. In the first game I took full advantage of the dug in positions I had with bunkers, infantry in cover and artillery to rain fire on Dave's waterlogged minions. I seemed to be doing pretty well (for me!), holding my own and wreaking some damage on Dave's special forces (who had the wrong insignia as Dave was keen to point out) and armour. However, Dave's special forces were mint and they caused a lot of damage in return once they got a bit closer. It came right down to the wire, with Dave and I both on four out of the five needed victory points. However, it was Dave's turn and I had some weak looking units within range of him, and he promptly finished them off, getting the victory point needed to win the first leg. Ding, ding! Round two. In the second leg tried to emulate Dave's successful strategy, but he brought his reserves out of cover to attack and this just overwhelmed me as I left a decent chunk of my troops in the water in reserve. Dave slaughtered me, quickly racking up the five kills need to win, while I could only manage two in return. Dave two, Jack nil.

Memoir '44 had taken about an hour and a half, and I didn't want to finish too late as I wanted to phone The Wife. So we chose Lost Cities as a nice quick filler to wrap up with. Dave had played fairly recently at one of my games nights so we were able to get stuck in pretty quickly. Dave's winning streak continued as he beat me 43 - 24 in the first game, but we played best of three, and I won the other two games, saving myself from a complete washout. Final scores: me 23, Dave -34 and me 60, Dave 25.

It was another fun evening, it's nice to hang out and play games with Dave, especially with The Wife away - I need the company. It's been a while now since we played Space Hulk, or any of our prototypes - hopefully that'll happen in the next few weeks - I was enjoying both of those.

Session Report: Games At Dave's

I went round to Dave's again for games this evening. Dave had suggested Memoir '44, Pirates of the Spanish Main and Codename: Monster. I got there a little late and had to leave fairly early, but we had time to play another Memoir '44 scenario where the Allies parachute into a small town from both sides, and one game of Pirates.

I started playing the Memoir '44 scenario as the allies, and I was sorely trounced by Dave's single unit of armour on my right flank. I tried to stay away from the armour, but Dave chased me down one unit at a time and slaughtered me. It was ugly. Fortunately, we were going to play it the other way round, and this time I'd have the armour :-). Didn't help much. Dave ganged up on my armour and destroyed them in fairly short order. It didn't help that I had four cards, three of which were for the centre, where I had no troops after the first turn or two. At one point I even had four cards for the centre and I had to discard one to get something useful. Dave creamed me again, a convincing win for him.

Next up was Pirates, and I was keen to redeem myself. We played a thirty point battle, Dave choosing a bunch of crew and three ships, while I picked two three-masters, a single mast ship and a Captain. Dave started first and came for me with two ships and went for an island with the third. I went for the other island near Dave with my biggest ship, and for another island with my other big ship. My single mast ship sailed in support for the one going near Dave. I managed to pick up treasure from the nearest island to me, and then drop it off at my home island and bring my Captained ship to bear. In the meantime I had collected the gold from the island nearest Dave and sunk his smallest ship using the big ship and the little one-mast one. Dave brought his larger ship over, and sent his other back to base to unload and then come and help. Fortunately for me, I now had a Captained ship (allowing me to move and shoot in a single turn) and my small ship to attack his nearest ship and provide cover for the big ship who managed to pick up another island's worth of treasure and drop it off at my home island winning the game. But not before I'd sunk another of Dave's ships. Ah sweet, sweet revenge.

It was even better as I'm reading a lot of the Aubrey/Maturin series of books by Patrick O'Brien at the moment, about the Napoleonic wars - it really makes the game better as I've got a really good sense of what it would be like to fight such battles.

All in all another good night of gaming, I'm enjoying Memoir '44, and it was nice to break out Pirates which I'd not played for ages. It was a shame I had to leave early, and we didn't get to play Monster, but there'll be another time...

In other news I sent a draft contract to the designer of Monster, and the haggling has begun...