Arctic Scavengers

Last night we got together and played Arctic Savengers at DK's. Thanks for hosting.

Arctic Savengers is a deck building game set in a post apocalypse second ice age. 

The game set up as DK went through the rules - the mercenaries you can (need to) buy to increase you 'tribe'. 

A rough outline of the game is to collect, mercenaries, equipment (can be tools or medicines) and buildings so you have the largest tribe at the end. 

Each turn you can use your hand of 5 cards to buy a mercenary, dig in the junk pile or get ready to fight for contested items. 

The game takes 17 rounds - for the first 3 there isn't any fighting as the players' hands are very similar - the next 14 rounds have a contested item to fight over. After the last fight the game ends and players count up their populations. 

This is a clever deck building game and I enjoyed it, even though I came last by some margin. 

DK and Steedo had an advantage over Snake-eyes and myself as this was their second game. 

DK won by enmbarking on a massive building program - buildings help by allowing you to store cards once they are built - getting them out of you hand, but allowing you to bring them out to win a fight and therefore a contested item. When things are being built more cards are taken from your deck - thus speeding up the recycling of cards.

Another key thing to get hold of are medics, pils and medkits - these are vital if you want to buy some of the more useful mercenaries - group leaders, sniper teams etc. Unfortunately I didn't ever manage to get enough 'med' points to buy these useful cards - I did have a lot of hunters and rifles, as I did a lot of digging. This stuff was then clogging up my hand, so I was unable to play cards in an effective way. 

Overall Arctic Scavegers is a good game, which we hopefully will get to the table again soon - not that I have a cunning new strategy to win it - but I have a better idea of how to play it! Or should that be of how NOT to play it!