Raiders of the Game Cupboard - Raiders VII

Report by Carl Cross:
It was another rainy day in Burton on Saturday so it must be a Raiders day! Just as well we all had something interesting to do indoors as Carol so rightly said.

I started my day with Tomb. A game I'd been wanting to try for some time since I'm a sucker for a dungeon crawl. It's is a simple and not at all cooperative romp. Each player recruits a party of adventurers and sends them into the Tomb to die. Simple as that.

This a game that demands to be played at a fast pace. When your turns will often only consist of moving (Cluedo style – not a big fan of this part of the design) or recruiting it can be over pretty quickly leading to lots of downtime as other players encounter their monsters and traps.

It's definitely not without it's charms (“click”) but for me there are plenty of other similar games that do it slightly better.

Jim ran away with this game and all surviving players cravenly held up the white flag and moved on to something else.

Which for me was Sator (etc.) the game of moving walkways. Once I'd managed to get my head around how the pieces rotated and stopped confusing perfectly clear shapes and patterns on the cards with others I really enjoyed this one.

It's a well balanced game with no obvious leader to pick on for most of the game (so apparently by default we pick on Paul) and a vicious end game where we desperately tried to scupper each other at the cost of progressing ourselves.

Paul and Carol's set also has some very attractive pieces painted by our own Mr. Evil Ginger I believe.

Carol emerged with her fourth book as the rest of the monks threw themselves from the walkways in despair and shame.

Next I did the playtest thing with the new Martin Wallace game that I'm probably not allowed to talk about so I won't. From what I played of it though it looks like another interesting wrinkle on some old themes from an ever reliable designer.

Finally we played a quick game of Looting London. A very quick game as it turned out, I think it only lasted about 20 mins.

Looting London is a filler game of set collection. Each turn you draw cards and try to match them to claim the set or sets that you are collecting. This being a Knizia game there are a few complications: only tiles from the bottom can be collected, other players can destroy tiles and the last set to be collected does not score.

This last rule left Carol high and dry as Matt collected (actually destroyed) the penultimate tile and left Carol with a score of 2. Matt won this one. I enjoyed playing it. It has something of a Ticket to Ride vibe about it but plays much more quickly. This series of small box games from FRED distribution is turning out to be fairly reliable for quality fillers (Roll Through the Ages and Incan Gold are both in the same series).

And so another Raiders ended not with a whimper but with a scrapping of chairs and tables as the whole thing was packed away again until September.