31st October - Hameln

Yes, I know, I'm a bit late with this post but better late than never. I was a bit busy over the last weekend playing with my new laptop (early Christmas present from the wife), I have just got to figure out the wireless router now! Anyway last tuesday we played the new Fragor game Hameln. As usual very nice figures, rats, pied piper and cat and the production of the game was much higher than Shear Panic, I think they were produced by Ludofact this time. Richard and Steve had played this last week, albeit with a few of the rules wrong, but this was a first playing for Garry and myself. Hopefully we would get the rules correct this time. The game is played in 3 phases, each phase ending when a pre-determined number of rats infest the houses of Hameln triggering the appearance of the Pied Piper. There are some unusual and interesting mechanics going on, each house is inhabited by a male and a female controlled by different players, and they have the opportunity to produce offspring as an action, said offspring going into the church waiting to be married off. I thought the cat was too expensive, cost 4, remove 1 rat, and in our two games he was only purchased once. I posted on the geek to that effect and within a couple of hours had received an email from Fragor saying that they had played around with the cat quite a bit before coming to the final ruling and that the cat was meant to be used sparingly and would be useful in the final phase, freeing an infested house to score points.



Our games played pretty smoothly and I think there was a mixed reaction to the game, we would play again but it seemed that although there was some interesting ideas here it didn't quite seem to gel. I took onboard the observations about the cat though, I could have freed up a house near the end to score another 5 points and that would have got the win I think.
OK, I have time to grab the results with a gentle push from Garry (he won both games), but the pics will have to wait until the weekend.

Final Scores (with minus points for children gone to Transylvania) most influence is the tie-breaker
Game 1
Garry 15, Richard 15, Colin 12, Steve 10

Game 2
Garry 13, Richard 12, Colin 11 (-1), Steve 3 (-6)