Thursday, March 5, 2009

3 March 2009 Session Report: The One Where We Took Red November For A Dive

Despite trading for Red November awhile back, I haven't been able to get it to the table. Finally I managed to persuade Van to give it a go with me. While the game indicates the game 'only' scales from 3-8 players, we decided to adopt the variant of each controlling 2 gnomes.

Having read the rules some time ago, I needed to revise the rules again. The rule book unfortunately was rather unconducive to quick reviews and this led to substantial downtime during turns as I flipped the rule book frantically in search of answers. This happened more than a few times and Van was clearly getting bored by the excessive downtime. I tried to qualify that this was typical of first plays in hope that she wouldn't be turned off by a negative first experience.

Personally, it was helpful for me to get a first play under my belt as it gave me a better idea of the game flow and some referencing to Red November's rules forum after the game enabled me to pin down the game more or less.

Hopefully, the next game will go down better, especially with Van. While I wasn't wowed by the game and somewhat frustrated by the downtime, I do see some potential in the game. I can see how Pandemic is a better game in some ways which perhaps explains its considerably higher ranking but I suspect I will probably enjoying playing this more. Will do a comparison of the two when I get the chance.

I will probably try it again with at least 3 since the variant of taking 2 gnomes didn't seem to fly with us - you are less attached to your gnomes since you can afford to lose one and it was distracting having to constantly switch between considering each gnome's items and circumstances.

Oh and by the way, our sub got destroyed around the 10min mark. We probably would have blew up earlier if we played all the rules accurately from the start...

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