Lords of Xidit

Tuesday 15th January.

Another evening in 'The Sovereigns' with Woking Board Game Club. 

On this evening we played 'Lords of Xidit', a game where you 'program' in your next 6 actions. The game is a fantasy themed 'pick-up-and-deliver' game, tasking you with recruiting heroes to fight against monsters as they appear on the board.
Cities (used to recruit heroes) and monsters appear randomly on the game board. Although, you can always see what the next tile is going to be. So astute players can take advantage of this when programming their moves.

What really makes this game stand out is the end-game scoring mechanic, which will influence how you play the game.
Throughout the game you will accumulate three types of 'scoring'.
These are; wealth, influence & reputation. Whenever you defeat a monster, there are rewards to be had in all 3 categories, but you can only choose to take 2 out of the 3 rewards.

Why does this matter, because scoring is done by rounds of elimination.

In the game we played:
In round 1, the player with the lowest wealth was eliminated.
In round 2, the player with the lowest reputation was eliminated.
In round 3, the player with the highest influence won the game.

But the order in which the elimination rounds occur is randomly determined at the start every game. So the rewards you need to choose will be determined this.

Furthermore, each of the 3 types of scoring is accumulated differently.

Wealth is kept hidden behind each player's personal screen and has no limit. Wealth is scored on a 1-to-1 basis. The higher, the better.

Reputation scoring is done in areas of the board which can be contested by all players, only the top 2 players in an area score for its reputation. Each player is limited to 20 reputation markers. A player's reputation score is calculated by adding up from all the areas where they can score.

Influence markers are placed on specific spots on the board, only one player can ever have influence in that spot. The most markers that a player can be placed in a single spot is 4. Players have 15 influence markers. Influence markers are scored in a 1-to-1 basis.

So all of this means that your approach to the game will need to adapt to the random placements that occur.

The only problem with this is that really you require at least 4 players to play the game properly, playing with 3 people requires you have a 'dummy' player that is added. And the game does not play for to at all.

We played it with 4 players and I enjoyed it (not just because I won ;)), I think everyone did.
The game was also enhanced by Andy B painting all the heroes prior to playing.

I'm not a particular fan of programming game, but I do think this is a good game: It plays well and the turns don't seem too long or too complicated.

Not only that. It's only a TENNER on Amazon at the time of writing. - my copy is waiting for me at the post office. I'm off to get it right NOW!