26th November 2019

Tuesday gaming night at 'The Sovereigns' is here.

The first game of the evening was 'Nine Tile Panic'.

Nine Tile Panic is a game that comes in a little box that delivers a lot of stress!
This is a game all about building a city but not just building a city. It's a game about building a city in a strict time limit!
Thinking about it, maybe we should get real city planners to play this game? You won't find any unoccupied roadworks in Nine Tile panic let me tell you.

What's in a game?
'Nine Tile Panic' has few components:

• ​Tiles: 45 double sided tiles, 5 identical sets of 9 cards for each player. The tiles depict different types of roads such as crossroads, T-junctions etc. The tiles also depict dogs, men-in-black, aliens, ufos, burgers, buildings etc.
• Objective cards: 26 cards that have objectives that need to be met each round.
• Order markers: There are 5 of these that are used to rank the finishing order at the end of every round.
• Scoreboard: Tracks scores!

The components are reasonably colourful with simple illustrations.

How's it play?
Before playing, give each player a set of tiles.
Nine Tile Panic is played over a series of rounds. Each round is scored before play proceeds to the following round.
A round goes like this:

• Set out order markers, according to the number of players.
• 3 objective cards are drawn. These objectives tend to be quite diverse and unusual. Each objective has variable levels of success. The better each objective is completed, the more points are earned. An objective might be 'have as many men in black pointing their guns at aliens as possible.
• Players now have to place their 9 tiles down in a 3x3 grid in such a way as to maximise scoring from the objective cards (Both sides can be used.). Players must however, follow this rule: Any roads on the tiles must enter and exit the 3x3 grid and must be connected to each other as required, there can be no 'dead ends'.
• Players can choose when to 'stop' building their city. The first player to 'stop', takes the highest value order marker and turns over the hourglass timer.
• All remaining players have 90 seconds to complete their cities. When a player stops building their city, they take the next highest value order marker. This continues until all players have taken an order marker, or the timer runs out.
• Once the 90 seconds are over, any player who has not claimed an order marker is eliminated. Furthermore, any city that does not meet the criteria for connected roads is eliminated from that rounds scoring.

Scoring:

• Scoring is based on the number of players participating. For a 5 player game, scores vary from 1 to 5, for a 4 player game it's 1 to 4 and so on.
• Each of the 3 objectives is scored separately. The player who has achieved the most of an objective will score the maximum points for it (5 points for a 5 player game.), the second best player to achieve the objective will get the second highest score. This continues until the lowest achieving player receives 1 point. Obviously, players who were eliminated in this round will score 0 (In all objectives.). Ties are settled using the order marker (Highest value wins ties.).
• This is done for all 3 objectives. Thus; in a 5 player game, a player who gets highest in all 3 objectives would score 15 points.
• Once all 3 objectives have been scored, a new round with 3 new objectives will begin.

Endgame
Play continues until the score limit has been reached. For a 5 player game this is 25 points.
Final scores are tallied, highest score wins. 

Overall
Nine Tile Panic is a small, quick to learn and quick to play game. A game can be 20 more than 20 minutes.

The game is supposed to be fun, but it should be called 'Nine Tile Stress!'. Why? Because there will always be that one player who's going to finish their city too quickly just to watch the other players suffer! That's why. Always!
You'll be swearing under your breath as any strategy you've concocted will fly out of the window and you'll just be trying to make any city you can!

And seriously, that's what makes Nine Tile Panic a good game and fun too.
If you have friends who like real time games, you should play this with them.
And if you have friends who hate real time games you should definitely play this with them!

12th July 2019

Friday gaming in lieu of WFRP continues with the 3rd game - 'Pit Crew'

We've all seen it, when a racing car pulls into the pits and the pit crew goes mental changing the tyres and refuelling the car.

Pit Crew is a 'team-based' card game that attempts to emulate this frenzied burst of activity by being a 'real-time' game.
How does this work? Well let's get to it.

What's in a game?
Pit Crew is a team based game and players will be in up to 3 teams of 1-3 people each. Thus the game supports 2-9 players. Components include:

• Game board: Depicting a oval race track.
• Wooden cars: To go on the race track.
• Car sheets: These each depict a racing car, one is given to each team. Each car sheet has 5 numbers, one of each tyre and one for the roof (Which represents fuel in the game.).
• A large deck of cards: Numbered 1-10 in black and white.
• A smaller deck of cards with special abilities.
• 2 Dice: normal six sided dice.

The components are fine, unremarkable and completely functional.

How's it play?
Firstly, all players are split up into teams of up to 3 each.
Each team is given a car sheet and each team is dealt a hand of numbered cards (Split between the team players.).

The objective of Pit Crew is to change the tyres and refuel your car as a team and then race it around the track on the game board. All of this is done in real time!

Changing tyres
To change tyres, the team must play 4 cards next to each tyre.

• The value of the first card must be 1 high or lower than the number shown on the car sheet. Thus if the car sheet has a 7 next to a tyre, the value of the card played by the team must be 6 or 8.
• The value of the second card must be 1 higher or lower than the first card played.
• And so on, until all 4 cards have been played.
• This must be done for all 4 tyres.

Refuelling
In order to refuel the car, multiple cards must be played on the refuelling number on the car sheet. The combined values of all of these cards must equal the value on the car sheet. Thus if the car sheet has a value of 23 for refuelling, then playing a  6, 4, 10 & 3 would equal 23.

Exiting the pits
Once all 4 tyres and refuelling has been completed, the car can exit the pits and enter the race.
However there's a little twist here. The better the pit change, the quicker the car comes out of the pits (The more spaces it moves.).
How is this calculated?
This is where the colours of the cards come in play.
If the cards used to change tyres are of a certain colour combination, then the car gets a bonus when leaving the pits.
The same is the case for refuelling.

Conversely; if the cards played on the tyres or fuel are the wrong numbers, then the car will suffer a penalty when leaving the pits.
If the penalty is bad enough, the car might crash out of the game!

Racing
Once a car exits the pit lane and begins racing, the team rolls a die to move. This rolling is real time and the quicker they roll the dice, the more they can move.
However once all cars have exited the pits, real time rolling ceases. From now on all rolling is done in turn order until the race is completed.

A game consists of several races. After a race is completed, each team is given a 'bonus' card.
Bonus cards confer random special abilities that can help a team or be used to hinder an opposing team.

Endgame
Once all the races have been run, the team that has won the most races wins.

​Overall
Pit Crew is a small, quick and easy game to learn. Which is good, because stopping to query the rules in the middle of a real time game could prove tricky.

This is the first real time tabletop game I've played and I've always been a bit suspicious of the concept. But Pit Crew was fun. I think this partially because each team plays separately and does not interfere with each other during the real time phase of the race. You have your teammates to consider!

Pit Crew is a cooperative game about completing tasks quickly, but accurately in a team. The Pit Crew theme fits it very well.

I think that Pit Crew is a game worth trying.