Oxford Plus Gaming

In attendance:
Adrian Barnard
Huw Morris
Simon Waldman
Ian Jenkins
Ralph Grimble

Ian and Simon were both joining us for the second time.

Ian had brought along Martin Wallace's Liberte, probably more in hope than expectation of actually playing it. As I am a great fan of Age of Steam, Princes of the Renaissance and Struggle of Empires, this was a game I was quite anxious to try. While waiting for everybody to turn up, we decided to have a look at it, and ended up giving it a go. Ian had only played one 3-player game, and even then hadn't got the rules completely right, and the rest of us had never played it at all. We agreed that this was a 'learning' game, and played with no expectation of a) playing with any strategy at all, and b) finishing the game.

Liberte
We started turn 1 with only a basic idea of playing cards to add markers to the board. The moderates won the election, with the Royalists as the opposition. Ian got quite mercilessly picked upon with cards like Bread Shortages, especially in Paris, which was probably enough for Simon to emerge as the leader, with Ian in second place. I was the leader of the Opposition.

In turn 2, battles come into play, and Ian, Adrian and myself had a go for the bonus. However, some ruthless guillotining of the generals ensured that nobody actually got the bonus. This turn ended surprisingly quickly, as quite a few moderate markers were still in play from turn 1. In particular, I hardly got to place anything on the board at all. (I was however, starting to get a grasp of the game, and was planning ahead... :-) The moderates won this election as well, but this time the extremists were in opposition. Ian got first place here (thanks to a 3-stack in Paris) with Adrian in second. Ralph was the opposition leader.

By turn 3, I had my cunning plan. The idea was to ride out turn 3, hoping for an extremist landslide, and if that failed, to go for a counter-revolution in turn 4. I'd been holding on to my large white and red cards through turn 2, while discarding all my blue cards. As it happened, lots of other large extremist cards came out, and lots of extremist markers went down on the board. Even so, we were all in agreement that the extremists would win the election, but fall just short of the landslide. And then...oops. In a classic 'first game' blunder, we'd all neglected the fact that Paris had a 3-stack of extremists, and that might tip things over the edge. In the end, it was Ralph who had to make the decision, whether to use one of his personalities to win a crucual province for the extremists. In truth, I think he did it to end the game, since it was about 10:50. Ralph probably thought he had a chance of winning this route - he knew I was also strong, but he didn't know just how much more red I had in my hand. Ralph was also doing pretty well on the points track, so it was probably a bit of a gamble for him. With more time and experience in the game, maybe he wouldn't have done it.

The points track at the end of turn 3, without applying the end of turn points was: Ian 8, Simon 7, Ralph 7, Huw 3, Adrian 3. However the extremists had won a landslide election, and these scores were now irrelevent. I had a healthy stack of red counters in front of me, on the board and in the hand, and it was enough to give me an easy victory: Huw 20, Ralph 16, Ian 12, Adrian 10, Simon 3.

On first playing, I liked this game a lot. There are many things to consider, and the timing of playing your powerful cards seems to be very important. In future, I expect people to be more cagey on turn 1, and players in the lead on the points track need to be very aware of landslide or counter-revolution victories. I was also pleasantly surprised that the game is easily playable in an evening. We only struggled for time because we started late, and then had to learn the rules. I would like to give this another go with 5 players as soon as possible.

Adrian adds:

Er, so we try to get the most influence in, er, any political party but the government is best. Meanwhile generals are being beheaded, at least my Napoleon was only purged. All sorts of dirty tricks and chicanery are being practiced with massed murder planned for the next turn, as well a sneak counter revolution when the Jacobean party leapt to the fore with a landslide victory in the third turn and the guy planning the royalist counter revolution wins out as chief Jacobite! (need one ask, it was Huw!) At least as the politics swirled around in the multi possible endings to the game the surprise result saw 1st relegated to last allowing me in to 4th / 5! Greatly enjoyed the game, look forward to playing it again.

# posted by Huw @ 1:29 pm