History of the World

We got together with our friends yesterday evening, and managed another full six-player game of History of the World. You'll be pleased to know that I didn't record it in detail.

Here's the end of the Second Epoch, with eventual winner Claudia (Red) having just completed the Persian move. She opted to go east, ignoring the Fortress Mesopotamia created by Marco with the Babylonians (which actually survived the whole game) and pushing into India and the far west of China. She lost a lot of troops attacking India, however, which limited her expansion.

The end of Fifth Epoch, with the Mongols (Brown - Me) having had a relatively successful turn. I didn't take the whole of China, but I did manage to get a solid foothold in Western Europe and improve my position in Southern Europe.

The nations I played. I didn't set the world on fire as Macedonia, but played a long game with what I did get, fortifying it and holding it until the end of the game Spain gave me a good boost near the end, and I did the best I could with Germany, but a couple of unlucky combats saw me fail to carve out the far-eastern colonial enclaves I was hoping for.

As I said above, Claudia won the the game, closely followed by Marco, who would have probably clinched a victory had he not been dealt the USA on the last turn, which somewhat limited his point-scoring. I came third. Maya managed to pick up the Inca/Aztec Empire, and also had ... the Maya. So she dominated the Americas with a vast, unified, empire for a couple of turns. Sadly she also draw a load of horse-nomads, which are fun for aggressive play, but less useful for empire-building. This cost her the big points. Catherine and John played a solid game, scoring well with Russia on the last turn, whilst Eric languished at the bottom of the table for the whole game, seemingly unable to hold any amount of territory for more than a turn.

History of the World is a great game but does take a while to play, especially if you don't play it regularly and have to relearn some of the nuances as you go along. Although the combat kind of involves the other players. there is a certain amount of payer down-time between turns, which a couple of our group found frustrating.

Maya also treated us to a round of Avalon, which is an Arthurian themed guessing/logic game in the style of Werewolf. We quite enjoyed it, but none of us were entirely sure how we were really supposed to achieve our goals, so it was all a bit random. We didn't have time for a second run-through.