Last night M had other plans and couldn’t join the game session. It was just A, J, and I.
J brought Perch. It’s an aggressive area-control game. You gain points by placing birds in various locations.The location set-up for our three-player game. Locations are chosen randomly for each game. The numbers in the upper right of a location show the points it’s worth for first, second, and third place for the number of a player’s birds present. Note that being in first place does not always get you the highest score.The central board at the start of the game. Birds that are displaced from their locations are placed here. It’s quite possible for a bird to be worth more points by being eliminated than it was by being in main location.Some of the locations give you control over animals that can be used to move birds around.The fountain at the end of our game. Black (A) got quite a few points in exchange from this. However, as you can tell from the scoring track, he came in third. In this deluxe edition of the game, “flipped” scoring markers (indicating you’ve gone around the scoring track) are hard to distinguish on camera, so you can’t yet tell visually whether J or I is the winner; wait until the next photo…It was Blue (J) who won the game. Green (me) went for a couple of high-profile scoring opportunities, but J played more carefully. Near the end of the game, he was pointing how I could gain a big pile of points… knowing that advice would not be enough for me to catch up his lead.
Be certain that you’re all friends before you start playing Perch, or you might not be friends at the end. As I said, it’s quite the aggressive game.
We still had some time, so we played a shorter game: Lanterns.Lanterns is a set-collection game. You gain cards through the placement of tiles. With every tile that’s placed, both you and the other players gain colored cards.During your turn, you can exchange sets of the colored cards for scoring tiles. At the start of the game, you get 8 points for four-of-a-kind, 9 points for three pairs, and 10 points for one of each color. As the players collect scoring tiles, the remaining scoring tiles in the stack are worth less.If I can place a tile with a square design in the middle, I can collect tokens that allow me to exchange one of my cards with a card of different color. But how to best place the tile? Hmm…The tile layout at the end of the game. In the upper left you can see that we scored quite a few sets.Behold the scoring tiles of the winner, A. Sometimes it’s better to go for a lot of low-scoring matches than a few high-scoring ones.
