NoBoG at the Mash Tun in Norwich saw a return to more familiar territory with a game of Lords of Waterdeep played with Weird FTW and the Orctioneer himself. Later on in the night we would also break out WeirdFTW’s copy of a kickstarter game called Private Die.
Lords of Waterdeep is a worker placement game published by Wizards of the Coast with players use agents to build buildings and collect resources. Players can use these resources to complete quests which give them points and other bonuses.
Each player also has their own lord who gives them bonuses for completing certain types of quests, my lord for example rewarded me for each arcarna and piety quest that I completed. luckily I started with one such quest and managed to get a pretty nice bonus at the end of the game.
In this game we had Lewis (WeirdFTW), Elliott (The Orctioneer), Chris, John and Myself. Chris and John were new to the game but they picked it up quickly and both scored over a 100 by the end. All told it was a pretty close game, especially as I managed to beat Lewis by a single point to claim second place.
Meanwhile Elliot showed us how it was done with an impressive score of 136. Over the course of the game he built some useful buildings and scored points from a lot of quests. I myself had done two 25 point quests and several others but even that wasn’t enough to beat The Orctioneer.
As the night was still early some of us decided to stick around and break out Lewis copy of Private Die by Mystic Ape Games. The aim of the game if to find fifteen clues, you do this by rolling a number of dice. If you get closest to the witnesses strength without going over then you get the clues.
You can gamble clues in order to add another dice into the mix but if you go bust then you risk loosing even more clues. Players have detective cards which give them each a unique ability but these can be affected by the text on witnesses, this text also can also affect their strength in various ways.
It was the first time that he had managed to get it to the table but somehow he got extremely lucky with his dice rolls and stormed off into the lead. Using our abilities made for an interesting game and eventually some of us even managed to begin the process of catching up with Lewis.
One player took longer than most to get on the score board but they didn’t stay there for long as they were convinced to gamble away their clues. Unfortunately the gamble didn’t pay off and now they were back to square one but that didn’t seem to matter as they were having a lot of fun playing this game.
Private Die was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed playing this game. For the most part your fate is left up to the will of the dice but there is some strategy to deciding how many to roll and when or if you should gamble. We didn’t have time to try the scenarios which was a shame but at least it will give us an excuse to play this game again, not that we really need one.
Have you played Lords of Waterdeep or Private Die? If you have then why not let me know what you thought of them in the comments.
James Hayward 