Last Night’s Game – Citizens of the Spark, Pina Coladice, The Fog
Yesterday, I told Real Angela that I was going to have an extended afternoon-to-evening game session with J, M, and A. (As an aside, they all knew each other from game events like the masquerade party I threw in 2019.) She asked the obvious question, “What are you going to play?”
I explained that I couldn’t answer. Here’s why:
Just a few games from J’s extensive collection.
When these sessions take place in M & A’s apartment, usually J brings brings some games and we choose from what he brings, or perhaps A & M will have one or two games that they’d like to try. When we have game sessions at my place, typically we play something that we’ve played before; Vindication, Great Wall, etc.
I couldn’t answer Real Angela’s question ahead of time, because there was no way to know.
Here’s what we chose:
Citizens of the Spark is about building a tableau of cards in front of you, then spending those cards to earn points.This was my tableau at the end of the first game. As you acquire cards, you stack matching cards on top of each other, which increases their effectiveness. For example, I’ve got two cards in my Warrior stack. If I spent the top card of that stack, I would gain Victory Points if I had more combat icons than the tableau of one of the people sitting next to me.Behold the tableau of the winner, M. She was able to build up a collection of card abilities and icons to defeat us handily.
We liked Citizens of the Spark so much that we immediately set up for a second game.
My tableau at the end of the second game. The game comes with lots of types of cards, with only some of them used in any given game. J asked which combination of card types we should use for the second game, and gave us a long list from which to choose. I impulsively said “Guilds,” figuring that would be all about gathering different types of icons.I was wrong. The “Guild” combination has card types that aggressively interfere with the tableau of other players, and other types (like the Trader in the picture) that don’t directly get you any Victory Points at all. J, whose end-game tableau is in the picture, won the game. We agreed that we didn’t like this combination of decks as much as we liked the first one.It was nearing dinnertime, so in the midst of food preparations we played a nice filler game: Pina Coladice.The game is a bit like Yahtzee. You set up a random collection of scoring tiles.You roll dice, trying to come up with combinations that satisfy the scoring requirements for the tiles. You get up to three rolls/re-rolls. Here we see M trying to decide whether to stick with a pair of 3’s, or whether to re-roll one of them to possibly get a 4 and therefore have a straight.In the end, it was J who won. My scoring tile is on the lower right; you can see that I just got 21 points and would therefore have been the winner. However, you “play out the round” so everyone has the same number of turns. J, playing red, completed four tiles in a row diagonally, which is an automatic and instant win for whoever achieves it. This was a fun little game, perfect for filler.The final game of the night was The Fog: Escape from Paradise. It’s basically a racing game, in which the players try to get as many of their people into boats before the fog encroaches on a tropical island.The movement of your pieces in the game is constrained by an “action point” mechanic. Here you see my action-point tracker for each of my turns. Each player also gets a helper card listing the possible moves (jumping, shoving, squeezing, etc.) and how many points each move costs.Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take a picture of the board during the course of the game, when it would have been filled with people jamming together to get on the boats. Here it is at the end of the game, when the fog (the curvy brown piece in the middle of the picture) has swept the island, destroying anything that couldn’t get out in time. We also made a mistake during end-game scoring, and removed the passenger tokens too soon. In the end, I won the game, but it was a fairly close spread.
It was a fun night! I hope A had a Happy Birthday. It was also the first game night M and A had since they got married. I hope there are many more happy game nights for them to come!
