| Here
you can find recaps of our gaming sessions. It's a great way to keep track
of what games we've played and who has been victorious. As a note
to our visitors, any of our members can post session reports. Look at the
bottom of each entry to find out who wrote the report.
Previous
sessions:
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| December 26th, 2002
special session hosted by Dale Y Gamers in attendance: Dale Y, John Mc, Luke H, Chad, Brian Y Games played: High Society, Age of Steam, Autoscooter, Princes of Florence, Web of Power High Society
To start the night off, we played a quick game of High Society while we waited to see if anyone else would make it. JohnM and Chad had never played before, so we quickly explained the rules to them. Early on, JohnM bought many of the auctions and paid dearly for them. Luke and I tried to be the voice of reason to remind him that if he had the least amount of money left at the end, he would be eliminated. Chad then went on his own buying spree prompting the same response from us two veterans. About halfway through the stack of possible auctions, 2 red bordered cards had already come up and JohnM had won 4, Chad had won 4, Dale had won 2 and Luke had yet to win any – though he was looking good as he had lots of money left. However, the next two cards happened to be red also and the game abruptly ended. After counting up the money, Chad had spent himself out of the game. JohnM managed to win and I was a very distant second (though I didn’t write down the actual scores, I think it was something like 14 to 5). Luke was third with 0 points. I don’t know if I’ve ever played a game of this where someone didn’t win an auction during the entire game! Age of Steam
Luke and JohnM wanted to play Age of Steam, so we pulled it back out. We went over the rules again to make sure we hadn’t missed anything (like the scoring issues from our last game) and got underway. This game was much different from the last. Money was much tighter in the four player game and the goods seemed to disappear from the board at an alarming rate! There was much more competition for the eastern part of the board and no one was able to really get a good network together from the start. About halfway thru the game, Luke, Chad and Dale were clumped together on the income track fairly close to each other and JohnM lagged behind somewhat. Actually, JohnM would have actually spent himself out of the game in turn three or four – but since we were playing a friendly game (and since it was JohnM’s first game) – we allowed him to redo his decisions so he could stay in the game. Unfortunately, while this kept him in the game, it did slow down his development greatly and he never really recovered from this. Luke again managed to set up a small network of multiple stop railways allowing his to get three and four link transfers consistently. As a result, he quickly broke even moneywise and only needed to take out 7 shares total for the game. Chad and myself were not as lucky and were taking out shares left and right (Chad with 15 and 14 for myself). I did manage to get a pretty good network set up from Detroit down thru Indy and on to Lexington and the rest of the lower middle part of the board. I was able to get 5 and 6 link transfers through here, but it was too little too late as well as too costly in terms of shares needed. Chad took his money and created a vast network along the entire bottom of the board – he was the only player to move any purple blocks from the eastern side of the board as he had both routes into KC as well as the railway network to make it there. Also, as he chose Engineer almost every turn, he had lots and lots of VPs from trackbuilding. In the end, Luke won due to his frugality with money. He spent very little on player order auctions and was 3rd or 4th most of the game – but still made the most of his order placement! Despite having a 10 VP advantage on the rest of us from tracks, Chad’s Achilles heel was his maximal share offerings which dropped his score greatly. A well balanced game with four – though a little long for my tastes at 2.5 hours. Autoscooter
Having just received the Butcherblock of Fun for Xmas, I wanted to pull it out. With four of us, we each got two cars and then were on our way. After some translation issues with the collision chart (only had one copy in English) – we set off to bash each other silly. One problem that came up was by the sixth round or so, most of the cars were completely stopped. To make it worse, the cars were all getting clustered together in one quadrant of the board. So, it was still possible to hit cars, but then if you hit one of the stopped cars, you stopped yourself. The game then became a bunch of pushing and shoving until someone could point to the outside of the group, move and turn around and then bash back into the pile and get stuck again. In the end, I won with 22 points (only 2 more than I started with…) Definitely not as much fun as I remembered. Perhaps I read a rule wrong? If anyone knows, please let me know! Princes of Florence
Brian then requested we play Princes, a game that Luke and I are very familiar with. Brian, however, has only played a few times. The game started off with a surprising Jester win for me at 500 florins – pushing me towards a work-jester based strategy. I won a 2nd jester in the 3rd round any my strategy was set. Luke, on the other hand, got 2 builders in the first three rounds and was on his way to a building strategy – eventually ending up with the maximum 8 buildings on his plot. He also managed to get 3 prestige cards along the way. Brian, who had only played a few times, had a much more fragmented strategy and never got the point machine going. At the end, Luke and I tied with 74 points (8 buildings and three prestige cards and two works for Luke and 6 works and 1 Prestige card for me) – and I won on the tiebreaker of having more money left over. Though old, still a great game, and I may be the only person around who still likes this better than Puerto Rico because of the many different paths to victory. Web of Power
To end the night, we chose Web of Power. This game was lightning fast – we finished in about 20 minutes! Luke started the game and had a pair of cards in his hand – so he played them as a wild and played a cloister in Frankenreich. Unfortunately for us, the face up two cards were both Frankenreich. At the end of the second turn, he had three cloisters already in Frankenreich! He was well into his plan of total and complete cloister domination of the board. I decided to try a less used strategy of trying to play all my advisors and win majorities and only play cloisters when they blocked off strings of opponents cloisters or when they would score a good 2nd place score (I did manage a 2 cloister play in Frankenreich for 5 points and a 1 cloister play in Bayern for 4 points). Brian tried to do a little of both. After the end of the first round, Luke was in the lead having the majority in most of the countries where cloisters had been played. Brian was a close second and I was trailing distantly as I had played very few cloisters to that point. I was however working on advisors in Frankenreich, Aragon, Bayern and England. The second round played out like the first except that Brian managed to get two long cloister chains built. Final scoring had Luke ahead by about 10 points – mainly due to his overpowering cloister domination. I jumped into second place due to having 7 alliance scores. Brian was close behind me thanks to 13 points from two long cloister chains. Still one of my favorite games because of the length of play and the fact that I’m still never sure who’s going to win until you count up all the points at the end! Report by Dale Y - top |
| December 20th, 2002
special session hosted by Dale Y Gamers in attendance: Dale Y, Luke H, John P, David P, Dave E, Mike R, Brian Y, Chase B, Andy Games played: Age of Steam, Spongebob Squarepants Splash-N-Roll, Die Heisse Schlacht am Kalten Buffet, Where There's a Will, Blooming Gardens, Carolus Magnus, Puerto Rico, Pizarro & Co, FFF, Monster Jan, Perilous Parlor Game A special session as Dale's brother Brian was in town for the holidays. Huge Multiple Game Session Report Age of Steam
The inagural game of Age of Steam
for our group. After a quick (OK, not so quick) rules review – we
got the game underway. We did manage to miss a rule or two – but
we still had fun anyways! Our game strangely started out as triple
solitare based on where we were sitting. I took the early initiative
in the bottom right corner of the board. Luke quickly set up a pretzel
network of rails in the middle and JohnP started out in the lonely west.
Luke quickly got up an income advantage by passing on the first goods turn
but then moving for two links for his second. The locomotive advantage
he got from this lasted the rest of the game (especially since Luke often
chose this ability as his special action).
Spongebob Squarepants Splash and
Roll Game
In a cute little roll the Spongebobs
game (akin to Pass the Pigs) – JohnP emerged victorious. We used
the variant suggested by the game designer (my brother) that when you are
done with your turn (when you stop to take the points) – you have to pass
the remaining Spongebobs to the next player. The next player then
has the option to try to roll the remaining Spongebobs to try to make a
valid pair. If he does so, he “steals” all of your points and then
continues his regularly scheduled turn. If he fails, he loses his
turn, and the player who passed gets the accumulated points. However,
if the next player chooses to pass, he can start rolling all six Spongebobs,
but he yields all of the accumulated points to the first player.
Die Heisse Schlacht am Kalten
Buffet
Luke requested we pull out this
older game as he really wanted to try it. This game has each player
as a potential buffet-goer who is in search of the best dishes. The
line to the buffet is a circle of 21 spaces, with the buffet table located
at the 21st space. The buffet table has one object up for grabs on
each turn. These objects are depicted on cards and range in value
from 1 to 7 points. On your turn, if you land on or pass thru the
buffet space, you take the top object from the stack. Thus, depending
on what is available, you may want to speed up or slow down your progress
to the buffet. There are about 20 different buffet tokens available,
and when they have all been collected, the game is over – and whomever
has the most points wins the game.
Where There’s A Will
Time for the new Ragnar
brothers release again. We had played this once before as a group,
and it was termed “Guillotine without all of the niggly card ruling errata”.
Our second game proved to be much of the same – still a great time had
by all in the luck fest of being in the right place at the right time with
the help of being dealt the right cards.
In our game, David P got off to
an early lead by winning the first round which had the only 8-point inheritance
out there. He also took second place in the second round for 3 points.
After the first round, he was already close to the victory. Unfortunately,
he spent much of his money improving guests and adding Damage cards to
his hand – and only had one dollar left over. This lack of money
made him vulnerable to attacks which need a money bribe to thwart and it
also compromised his ability to add cards to his hand.
Blooming Gardens
Carolus Magnus
Puerto Rico
Played our first game with some of the new buildings – I wrote down the new ones we used, but none of the older buildings, so I can’t give you the full rundown. In short, the game went as follows. I wanted to try out some of the new buildings – so I went for a modified builder strategy. Starting with only one poor corn plantation (and only ending up with three total), I used the hacienda for quarries, the black market to further push down prices and the church to give me points for the buildings I built. I tried to ship when I could and once got away with a Captain phase where I got 7 points – thanks to the Union Hall – and no one managed more than 2! The guesthouse also proved important as it allowed me flexibility to power up the buildings or quarries as I needed them. I spent most of the game choosing to be the builder or whatever was left from the round before to gain money as I had few ways to generate cash. Chase and Brian both tried to use shipping strategies and both chose the aqueduct as their first building. Unfortunately, they were sitting right after each other and Brian continually found himself unable to ship his indigo as Chase had already filled up the boat! They also found that they couldn’t always get all of their goods during production for this same reason. JohnP tried a building strategy but trying to use his monopoly of tobacco to power the market to make money for his purchases. Luke shipped away anything he could and used his coffee for money as well. Through most of the game, it looked like Luke was going to win as he had the majority of shipping points. But in the end, the points I had received from building via the early purchase of a church proved to be the deciding factor. The new buildings add much spice to the game which was frankly getting stale (partly from overplay IMHO) – but I’ll have to try the new buildings a few more times to learn their subtleties. I’m pleased to see that the new buildings will also add in some uncertainty to the games as no one will know for sure which buildings will be included. I think this will shake up the strategy aspect somewhat as there will now be even more paths to victory – and that you won’t be able to count on a certain building or combination of buildings to be available to be used! Pizarro and Co.
Looking for another relatively quick game while Carolus Magnus was about halfway done, we chose Pizarro and Co. This is a game with lots and lots of auctions. We played with the most basic setup of the boards (Magellan takes one card from your hand of your choice and Cook causes you to play with your hand face up). Early bidding was quite low (probably from the fact that there were 2 players new to the game) but this quickly escalated. Andy and Dale bought often and early. Andy got a quick Columbus and Magellan and Dale got 2 DeGamas off the bat. Bidding picked up and the other jumped to place their ships on the board. Chase, who lurked most of the early part of the game then came away with two of the James Cook spaces (and the potential for high scores!). At the end of the first round, Luke, JohnP and myself had 4 ships on the board and Chase and Andrew had three. The second round was relatively uneventful, but the third round was full of surprises! JohnP and Dale got into a huge bidding war over Pizarro (As neither wanted to be left in the space with 0 VP) – Dale won this with a bid of something like 35 – but this depleted his chances of taking James Cook. Chase won this and this was enough to propel him to victory. This is still one of my favorite auction games, and despite all of the auctions in the game, I still haven’t tired of it. As an added bonus, even with rules explanations, the game was done in less than an hour. FFF
As both tables were ending around the same time, we played a great two-board game of FFF. The first board started at store #9 and the 2nd board started at store #29. Though the first board seemed somewhat easier to navigate and accumulate goods and money, the newly translated errata that we had somehow missed seemed to balance this out. The rule that we missed what that you have to switch boards after getting a fetish before you can get your next fetish. Therefore, you have to move at least twice in the game if you are to win (though you could certainly choose to move more than this). The first table (which had myself, Mike R, JohnP and Andrew for starting players) moved quickly. Prices quickly plummeted as the fetish dealer trade-ins caused at least three commodities to drop in price. Furthermore, the store with the raise all prices symbol on it was tucked in the bottom left corner and no one wanted to go that far from the fetish dealer who was in the upper right corner! John P and Andrew got their first fetish and moved to the other board. This left Mike and Dale at the first board to get their fetishes. Once that was achieved, neither player wanted to leave and let the other player get a board to himself, so these two stayed put and made lots of money and speculated over what set of goods they should bring over to the other table. After about 5 minutes of quick playing – dale had about $250 and all the goods he wanted and Mike had 7 goods and over $400. Once two players jumped over from the other table, we both left for the second table. As we sat down, John P and Andrew had still not gotten their second fetish as they were still in the process of collecting their goods on the other board. Mike had guessed the right fetish requirement (2 pairs) and swooped in for the second fetish. As he had already built up a significant amount of money, acquiring the needed goods for the third fetish was no problem at all. Mike quickly moved back to the first table and won. Dave E and John P were the next two to finish. As we play this more and more, I still think it’s better on a single board – but the added time pressure of FFF on the multi-board format is a great and novel addition to the game closet. Luckily, there are now 5 copies of FFF floating around our group, so we should never have a lack of them around! Monster Jam
As the hour was getting late,
most everyone else left, leaving the four of us looking for a game.
Brian pulled out some of his new production copies of soon-to-be-released
games for a runthrough. First was Monster Jam, a pseudo-racing/betting
game based on a monster truck race. This game may be considered similar
to Esels Rennen where you are given an order of finish of the three trucks
in the game and you score points based on how the actual results match
up to that listed on your card. On your turn, like Esels Rennen you
can move any of the three trucks available.
Perilous Parlor Game
As it was even later now, we decided
on one more game. Brian still had one more game for us to evaluate
– the Perilous Parlor Game which is a game based on the Lemony Snicket
series of novels entitled A Series Of Unfortunate Events. Unlike
Monster Jam, all four of us in the game were interested by this one just
on the description alone.
Report by Dale Y - top |
| December 7th, 2002
special session hosted by Scott & Cheryl T. Gamers in attendance: Scott & Cheryl T, Ted C, Dale Y, Luke H, John P, Andy, Mike R, Scott B Games played: Essels Rennen, Blooming Gardens (x2), Fette Autos, Crokinole, Where There's a Will, Fishce Fluppen Frikadellen, Crazy Race, Cannes, Mogul, Keythedral A special session as our buddy Ted Cheatham came for a visit. Click on the games above to see Dale Y's reports at the Boardgame Geek. Report by - top |
| December 6th, 2002
monthly session hosted by Dave & Jina E. Gamers in attendance: Dave & Jina E, Andi, Dale Y, Scott B, Matt G, Jeff F, Steve, Rhonda & David P, Matt H, John P, John Mc Here is the long-awaited summary from our session Friday, December 6th. I'll apologize in advance if I messed anything up. Thanks, again, to everyone for coming. We had a great turnout and had lots of fun. Game:
TransAmerica
Game:
Sopwith
Game:
Carcassonne
Game:
Mogul
Game:
Foosball (2 games)
Game:
Fische Fluppen Frikadellen
Game:
Risk: The Lord of the Rings
Game:
Titan, The Arena
Game: Zooism
Game:
Fische Fluppen Frikadellen
Reports by Dave E and Dale Y, comments by JP - top |
| November 30th, 2002
impromptu session hosted by Dale Y. Gamers in attendance: Dale Y, Luke H, John Mc, Matt H, John P, Brian Y, Andy, Mike R Games played:
Goldland, Fishce Fluppen Frikadellen, Trias
Report by - top |
| November 14th, 2002
impromptu session hosted by Matt H. Gamers in attendance: Dale Y, Luke H, Matt H, John P Four of us got together to take Keythedral and Cannes for another spin. Report by - top |
| November 8th, 2002
monthly session hosted by Scott & Cheryl Gamers in attendance: Scott T, Cheryl, Dale Y, Luke H, John Mc, Matt H, John P, Scott B, Debbie, Dave E, Gina Games played: Acquire, Morisi, Wallenstien (partial), Titan: The Arena (partial), Traders of Genoa, Diceland (Deep White Sea), San Marco, Evo, Wognar, Kohle Kies & Knete, Villa Paletti Report by - top |
| November 1st, 2002
impromptu session hosted by Dale Y. Gamers in attendance: Dale Y, Luke H, John Mc, Matt H, John P This session report is from a special session proposed to get some of the meatier four and five player games out onto the table. The date was set at the last meeting and the games were chosen. Rules were even distributed ahead of time! (But it didn't seem to help as I don't think we really read them ahead of time...) 1. Kahuna Luke got to the house early, so we picked out a quick 2 player game to pass the time. Luke wanted to try Kahuna, so we ran thru the rules and started to take control of the twelve islands. The game is pretty simple; there are 12 islands on the board, and there are cards that have the names of the islands on them. On your turn, you can play up to five cards, each of which allows you to place a bridge from the island named on the card. When you’re done with playing cards, you get to draw one card to replenish your hand (from any of three face up cards or from the facedown deck). If you control a majority of the bridges to an island, you get to place a power marker down on the island and as a bonus, you get to remove all of your opponents bridges from that island when you take control of it. If at anytime you lose control of the majority of the island, your power marker is removed from the island. Due to the interlocking nature of the islands, control of an island may be lost when one player takes control of one island and causes bridges to be removed. You can also remove a bridge from the board by playing two cards with the names of the islands involved. Early on, I tried to control the center of the board, and was able to take control of the three central islands early on in the first round. However, I fell prey to losing bridges as Luke took control of the islands on the periphery. Slowly but surely, he killed me. The key moment was when Luke was able to remove one of my bridges on a central island and then placed his own bridge in the same place to take control of the island. Once I lost all of my bridges from that island, I was screwed. Luke won the game 10 to nothing. Ouch. I rate it 7/10, Luke 8/10. 2. Cannes The two
Johns strolled in one after another, and we were set for Cannes.
This new release from Splotter had just arrived in John P’s hands recently,
and he was anxious to play it. We were going to play it the Friday
previous, but had to shelve it when six people showed up. Based on
the rules, it seemed like it would be Roads&Boats light, and after
playing it, I think this is true!
The game moved along quickly once we figured out the rules. In many ways, the game seemed like simultaneous solitaire as there were little interactions between the players other than an occasional rod placed to specifically thwart another player from getting directly to a tile that he needed to be at. However, one reason for this may be that the Old Boys network never appeared as a factor in our game. The golf course tiles which gives you the ability to place an Old Boys network piece kept on being placed back into the draw pile I think that they didn’t make it out until the last 10 tiles total in the game! John P figured out the game the quickest (and was the luckiest with the early tiles) and was able to get his network setup to quickly produce two sci-fi films and sell them in Cannes. Luke and John M saw this plan, and when John P left the loop to get his network to Cannes, they swooped into the area and made sci-fi movies of their own. I, on the other hand, concentrated on movie stars, hoping to make girlie films – of course the catch to this plan was that the tile that made girlie films out of movie stars and scripts was still not on the board. Luckily for me, I drew that tile and placed it off to the side of the party where I was the only one able to get at it. I then used my stockpile of movie stars to make 4 girlie films and sold them off at Cannes for the win. As I kept the girlie movie production tile busy until near the end, no one else was able to make any of those movies. Final scores were: Me 48, John P 26, Luke 24, John M 23. (I made 4 movies and everyone else only made 2). The game seemed to end too quickly. Just as the interesting networks were being established and people were able to start making movies, the game ended. Now this may have been aberrant given we didn’t have the advantage of Old Boys networks to link into early on, but this could be a potential problem. (Especially as the rules state that use of the Old Boys network will hasten the end of the game! - jp) Also, the starting values of the movies seemed too high for the low number of movies made in our game. With the starting value set at 13 and the max set at 15 – there was little opportunity for bribing critics with beers to raise the movie value. It was suggested by a number of us that it might be better to start movies at 8 or 9 – that way, there is still room to go down, but there is also plenty of room to go up. This would also add more strategy to the bribing, because there could be much more advantage given to the opponents if one person was over-zealous on the beer. Also, we muddled thru the first half of the game trying to do all the production machinations in our head – it proved to be much easier to give each player all the primary production items that he would make that turn and then let him convert them as he was able and then just made sure that there were no more than 5 items left at the end of the turn. But, that being said, it was still quite a fun game. Everyone seemed to like the game, and we were all in agreement that the game ended too soon. Ratings were from 6 to 8 out of 10. Personally, I thought it was an 8/10. And like everyone else in the group – I’m looking forward to trying this one again soon to experiment more with the mechanisms and the strategy. You do get the feel of Roads and Boats but in a much more manageable 60 min time frame. 3. Keythedral After Cannes, the group quickly turned to Keythedral – the other game that the group had convened specifically to play. The new release from Richard Breese had just come in the mail the week before. Luckily, the board was one piece, unlike that in Keywood, and there were no anxious moments trying to figure out how to keep the board in pristine shape while stored in the box. To win the game, you have to buy the most valuable seats in the Keythedral. To do this, you buy them with commodities and craft cubes (think resources from Settlers). In order to produce these cubes, you harvest them from fields in a way sort of similar to Settlers also. The board is modular and different each game. The fields (5 different types) are octagonal in shape leaving squares as holes between them when placed in a lattice. Player’s cottages are placed in these squares, and the cottages are numbered from 1 to 5. The board is created as each player places one field and one cottage until all have been placed on the table. Then in the production phases of the game, you place workers from these cottages onto adjacent fields to make the corresponding cube. These cubes can be used to buy the seats in Keythedral or do all sorts of other things like place fences, buy craft cubes (needed for higher valued seats) or to buy law cards – these cards give special abilities/penalties such as changing the price of a seat in the Keythedral, raising or lowering cube production or changing turn order. (Sort of like the action cards in Torres) As far as the game went, it moved along smoothly. The first playing of the game showed some flaws to initial field and cottage placement, but c’est la vie. Note to self – don’t place one of your initial cottages on the periphery of the board, everyone else will just build the kingdom in the opposite direction and strand that cottage. I think you’d like to maximize the production potential of your cottages by having them surrounded by 4 producing fields, not just two. Another note – make sure you read the inside edges of the box bottom before you play the game as there were many helpful hints (such as the cottage placement noted above) which are all over the inside cover! :-) (You'll also find a history of R&D games there too - jp) In the first round, everyone made oodles of cubes and promptly used them to buy the Keythedral seats (as none of the 1st round seats needed any craft cubes). The people who didn’t but seats used their cubes to convert their cottages into houses (which double production akin to cities in Settlers). The rest of the game, most people just concentrated on getting cubes and buying seats. Very few fences were placed. People did buy most of the law cards and they had varying levels of effectiveness – this was much like Evo where some cards were almost game breakers and some were completely useless. The game ended before any of us were ready though – in 6 turns. This was quicker than we thought because the rules state that it should take 8 to 9 turns on average. Our quick end seems to jive with other reports I’ve read here on the ‘Net. The game has a lot of good ideas, but it seems to end to soon to take advantage of them. If the game were longer (either more seats to buy or make the seats more expensive) – I think that the game would be much better. It seemed like it was too easy to buy one. Even the higher level seats (level 4 and 5) which needed craft cubes to buy them, were not hard to obtain – often they could be purchased with just one turn’s cube haul (this assumes that you were able to convert many of your cottages to houses). The craft cubes are a good idea, but there are just not enough of them. It was easier to just think of the craft cubes as just meaning 2, 3, or 4 extra cubes of any type added to the cost of the Keythedral seat. Ways to change this feeling might be to add one or two more cubes to the cost of the seats, scrap the rule allowing you to trade production cube types forcing players to produce the specific types of cubes during the production phase. One other suggestion might be to simply add one or two more seats to each level of the Keythedral to prolong the game length in that way. I like the game, and I think it’s the best of all the Key-games, having played all of them at least once. Keywood would be a close second. John P won this 12-10-10-9-5. Everyone rated in 8/10 and also wants to play this one again soon. I’ll try to modify the board to allow for more seats in the Keythedral and see if this improves play any or at least makes the game play more satisfying by making the game a tad bit longer. 4. El Grande I’m sure we’ve all played this before, so there is no need to belabor the mechanisms. John M wanted to play this one because he had emailed all of us the week before stating he “wanted to play a game where colored cubes battle with each other for control”. Surely he wanted to play El Grande! Actually, he’d never played it before which was one other reason we thought we had to get it out. The game went along predictably until about 75% of the way thru when John P misread the rulebook concerning the interpretation of one of the II column cards – the one which forces each player to choose one region and remove all his caballeros from it. Going by pictures alone, John P read everyone the description of the next card in the rules – the one which stated you had to have at least –two- caballeros in the region you chose. This caused myself, John M and John P to remove all our pieces from regions we didn’t have to.(It was an honest mistake - really it was. You can tell by my final score. jp) I don’t know about everyone else, but I ended up losing six more caballeros (And first place in a region) due to this misconstrued card. As such, I’m not sure how much this affected the results other than it screwed me over royally. As we kept playing, something didn’t seem right when we drew a card from the 2 stack that sounded just like the card we had just looked up the rule for. Only then did we realize that we had used the wrong rule for the first card. Oops. The game ended soon after with Matt H far in the lead. Matt 107, Luke 85, John M 81, Me 74, John P 65. We chose not to rate this given the rules butchering we had given the game. 5. Titicaca Finally, with all of us too tired to start another game, we chose an “easy” one in Titicaca. Ha Ha – wrong. It took about 10 minutes to go over the differences between a neighboring and an adjacent country, and at which times you could join some countries and not others. The board was randomly set up with both the 5 and 10 lakes off in one corner of the board. (Lake 1 was also nearby and I think that's what really determined the outcome. - jp) They actually shared one land hex between them, and only had three total hexes otherwise bordering them. The game started expensively (I was the only one who had played before) as everyone was bidding high not knowing any relative values for the closed fist auctions. Though I felt I was going to be in a good place by waiting, it never materialized. I was able to win many of the later auctions, but never in the places I wanted my houses to go! John P was able to get a stronghold in the country which would eventually border lake number 5. He had the lead in 3 of the 5 land types as well as the most houses overall in that country (and started a long row of contiguous houses). He used this to take a huge advantage after the first scoring and get oodles of weapons for bidding later in the game. Since one of these hexes also bordered lake 10, he used this to take an even huger advantage after the second scoring. The endgame came all too quick in this one (like it usually does) – you think that after the second scoring round that you are 2/3 of the way thru the game, when in actuality you are about 90% thru the game because many of the lakes 11-15 already have all of their hexes occupied. In our game, we only had one auction – for lake 15 – after the lake 10 scoring. Needless to say, John P ran away with the victory. John P 132, Luke 98, Matt 88, Me 74. I’ve only played this four times now, but this is the first I can remember where one person got ahead after the first scoring and had it snowball to the point where no one else could catch him. That one country allowed him to both score points when the rest of us couldn’t in the interim scorings, and the fact that his houses there were part of a line of houses gave him an almost insurmountable amount of weapons to allow him to place houses wherever he wanted in the later auctions. This was probably due to the fact that the hour was late, many of us were newbies, and that I was holding back trying to win more late auctions. What happened was that the three of us let John win critical auctions later, which buried us in the end. An impressive victory to close the night. Ratings: John 7/10, Me 5/10, Luke 4/10, Matt 4/10. Report by Dale Yu (editorializing by John P) - top |
| October 25th, 2002
impromptu session hosted by Dale Y. In attendance: Dale Y, Luke H, John P, John Mc, Trish Mc, Angela Games chosen for their playability with six… At this rate, I’ll never get to play Kings and Castles, Cannes, or VOC! – all of which I want to try, but the numbers just haven’t been right. On the table: 1. Loopin’
Louie
OK, so you’ve all seen this before. The moral of this story is that you never want to be one of the last two players when the other player is directly behind you. You’re screwed six ways from Sunday and can’t do anything about it. Luke wins the first one, then John P. Rated 10/10 because I like kids games. (If you haven’t done it yet, sign up for “Kinderspielfrieks” on Yahoo! Groups, our new spin-off group for discussion of all things kids games – I expect a spike in traffic soon as Christmas/Hanukkah approaches and then discussion of new games as the presents are opened) 3. Ein Arsch Kommt Selten Allein Got this one on a lark on my last Boulder Games order. It helped that Jim threw it in for like 3 bucks or something. Anyways, I was intrigued by Stephen Glenn’s previous remark that it was a deck full of cards with pictures of asses on them. What could be better? Well, a lot of things it turns out – including being knocked out of Diplomacy in the first year of the game at someone’s house whose cable is out, no beer in the fridge and the air conditioner is on the fritz too… I’d describe the game, but for lack of willpower, I won’t. Suffice it to say I think it stinks. The first hand lasted about 4 rounds (2-3 minutes) and it seemed like an OK filler, then the next hand was so long we nearly threw in the cards. Bleech. 1/10 (only because of the G-string tan lines on the “hot” ass) 4. Metro A great tile laying game from Dirk Henn. I must say I like this version better than Iron Horse for two reasons. 1) I own this one, 2) the mass produced tiles in this case overwhelm the natural charm of the homemade db spiele tiles. This turned out to be a rather cut-throat game of Metro, as it seemed like most people were playing tiles to shorten other player’s lines rather than extending their own. As we had three players new to Metro, we played with the original rules that force you to keep all the tiles in the same orientation. Luke H won largely due to a huge convoluted line that ended in the center (scored 32 or 36). Rated 6/10 with these rules – it’s a 8/10 game with our house rules which do not force tiles into a particular orientation and add a quick (30 sec) timer to your turn. This forces quick play and the time pressure makes the game more tense as you are not able to look at all options for the “optimal” play! 5. Payoff Just like last week, my lack of intuition and skill proves to be my downfall. Luke H in a landslide (And the red marble to boot). Rated 5/10 (and going down!) mainly because I’m still pissed that I neither own the game nor am able to play it well. 6. Royal Turf Still on the six player pick, I went to the basement and emerged with Royal Turf. John M wanted to play a horse game so it was either this or Jockey (Ravensburger). After a quick rules review, the horses were off. As it seems to happen in every game I play, Earl Grey is shunned by all the punters except one. That poor sap was John P and his horse got killed. It may not have even made it across the start line before the winner won the race. The rest of the game was really uneventful except for the third round when Trish and I were the sole backers of Caramello. Of course, she had her 0 tile on it, and I got completely hosed. Caramello didn’t make it past the start line before the winner came it. Ouch. John M proved to be the best better of them all. Rated 5/10. After maybe 10 plays, I’m still not sure if I like this one or not. At times it seems like this is six player solitare because there is not much interaction between players at times (or maybe it was just the group we were playing with). 7. KK&K After the last two games, the mood was right for KK&K. After explaining the rules (carefully with when you can use Stop cards) – we were bargaining and dealing fools. This group was definitely into the “everyone draws cards until we’re up to 12 and then let Armageddon occur”. Wow. For the first deal (total 8M) – we probably used half the deck. And we were so into screwing each other over, no one sand bagged with their cards to try to take an easy one right afterwards while everyone else was drawing. You know, there’s nothing better than someone killing a deal for no other reason that to spite the Boss. Even better were the vicious interplay between the husband/wife team of John Mc and Trish. Having players so close to each other personally always adds that meta-game in of deals occurring with payoffs (or penalties) outside of the game! As usual, the table perceived one person (incorrectly) to be in the lead while the real leader continued to slowly but surely extend away from the rest. When the dealing was done (after the 11th deal!), John M was in the lead. I was only 2M behind, and had actually stayed out of the bargaining on the 11th (and final) deal, hoping to get an “easy” part of the next deal. However, as usual, the game ended on a “1” roll and I was S.O.L again. Still a classic game, and one of my favorites. Rated 9/10 – especially with the group with which it was played. I’m very glad that I have managed to acquire a copy of this game, but frankly, if I didn’t, I don’t know if I would be willing to pay the amounts which the current market bears for this one… (Same goes for Big Boss and McMulti – though I have those as well – I managed to trade for these with games I was less fond of). 8. Don As we tried to settle down from the excitement of KK&K, Luke called for an auction game. As Don was close by, we took it out for a quick spin. I tried a strategy that I have seen work in the last few games that I have played – namely, try to win one of the first two auctions and then simply wait out the auctions with cards of the same color and do your utmost to win those and only those cards. I thought I was doomed from the start, having to pay 11 chips for a blue 9 and orange 3 in the second auction. Down to one chip, I actually was out of the bidding for the next four to five auctions. Luckily, in those draws, only 3 blue and orange cards came up. Also, I did manage to collect a solo 9 chip buy and split a 13. The cards then fell in my favor and I managed to pick up 3 more blue cards and 2 more orange cards through the rest of the game. I won in a runaway as no one else was able to manage more than a 3-of-a-kind. Rated 7/10. It gets this higher rating more for the speed with which you can finish the game than the game play. There’s not much game here, but it only took 20 minutes, so that’s OK with me. 9. Sticheln Finally, to close out the night, we took out the intriguing game Sticheln (translated “Prick” in my rules…). This is a very interesting trick taking game of 6 suits from 1-15. The object is to have the most points. You simply score 1 point for each card that you win in tricks. Well, actually, it’s more complicated than that. At the start of each hand, you have to choose one of your cards as your “misery” color. During the rest of that hand, each card that you “win” in this color will actually cause you to lose the face value of that card. (You also lose the value of your misery card as well!). To make the game more confusing, there is a very different concept of trump than from conventional card games. As in most games, a trump card will win over non-trump cards. However, in Sticheln, every suit except for the suit initially led is trump. This leads to some interesting card plays. About the only thing you can count on is that the person who leads the trick will not win the trick because every card in the 5 other suits is trump! The game becomes a tight balance of trying to win as many tricks as possible, as each card won is worth +1 point; though, each trick you win increases your chance that someone will play a card of your misery suit on you causing you to lose the value of that card (from 1 to 15 points). I think the toughest choice of the game is trying to choose what suit to call as your misery suit – do you choose a suit that you have a lot of high cards in so that you know where they are (and then try to slough them off if possible) or do you choose a suit that you have few cards in or only low cards in? After a few plays of this game, I can definitely say I don’t know. I just go with what seems best on initial glance at the deal and choose something. In our game, the six of us fumbled around for the first two hands as really no one could get a grip on a good strategy to win cards they wanted without taking misery cards. As a result, the game was quite slow from the start – everyone played defensively and scores were very low after the first two rounds. The game then got more intense as a few players (John P and Angela) took whopping negative hands. This caused them to play more aggressively to try to take as many tricks as possible to get more positive points. We had decided early on to play six hands (one deal for each player) and there was not enough time for those behind to catch Luke. Luke managed to win by never taking a negative score in the six hands. Rated 7/10 – lower rating mainly because this game can get a little frustrating if some players are not playing “optimally” – very similar to Tichu which can be really excruciating and unfulfilling if one of the players is unable to pick up the subtle nuances of card play and timing needed to play well. As it was
1:00 AM now and I had to work the next day, I kicked everyone out.
|
| October 18th, 2002
impromptu session hosted by Dale Y. Games Played Recently (loosely used term here) My brother was in town from LA and this provided an excellent excuse for an impromptu Friday afternoon meeting. Not many could make it due to the strange time (and the numerous employment obligations of our members). In Attendance:
Dale Yu (called in sick)
On the table
were a number of older games – chosen because either my brother hadn’t
played them before or because the group just hadn’t played them in awhile
and this seemed like a good chance to get them to the table. Most
of our usual meetings are dominated by the newer games because they’re
“sexier”.
1. Heimlich & Co. Brian and
I started off with this old Kramer design. Admittedly, not the best
game for only two players, but I think Brian is trying to get some new
gaming ideas for a deductive game in the future. After explaining
the rules, we started rolling the die and moving the spies around.
For those who haven’t played before, the game has 7 “spies”, and each player
is secretly one of the spies. On your turn, you roll the dice and
then move any spies you want around the board. The spaces on the
board are basically worth 1-10 points each and a
2. Schotten Totten Then, waiting for more players to come around, we pulled out Schotten Totten. Brian wanted a quick card game and was intrigued by the idea that a rethemeing or renaming of a game could generate more sales (i.e. Heimlich & Co = Spies Inc. and Shotten Totten = Battle Line). This is a little territorial game based on 3-card poker hands. The game is set up as a line of 9 battles (Thematically between two warring Scottish tribes). The deck is made up of 6 (I think) suits of cards numbered from 1 to 9. Each turn, you get to play one card face up on any of the nine battles. Each battle is taken separately and is resolved once there are 3 cards on each side of the battle or when one player can guarantee that his opponent could NOT play any cards to change the outcome of the battle. The rank of the hands are: straight flush, 3 of a kind, flush, straight, high card. The game continues until someone wins 5 battles or 3 battles that are contiguous to each other on the board. The game started evenly as each brother won two battles early on. However, the end came quickly for Brian as he didn’t really realize when battles would end early. Dale went on to win 4 battles to 2 (3 of the wins were in a row on the board). Rated 7/10. 3. Timbuktu Scott Tullis arrived and brought with him an old db spiele classic, Timbuktu. Though still not fully caffinated, Brian’s desire to play more deductive games brought this one out to the table. This one is a true brain-burner! OK, so it doesn’t have two names, but it came up after a discussion of Dirk Henn games (Iron Horse = Metro). In short, each player is a desert trader with a boatload of camels (6 camels with 3 players). Each camel is able to carry 4 trade items (out of 5 different types). Thus loaded, the camels set out to cross the desert – represented by three boards. The catch is, as the camels cross the desert, there are thieves that hide at 5 certain spots on each board and steal certain commodities from whatever hapless camel lands there. At the start of each round, you know the location of one of these thieves and what they are going to steal. As the round continues, this information will be passed around the board so that by the end of the round, each player will know the info of 3 of the 5 thieves. Confused yet? Anyways, you move all the camels and then resolve the thievery. Then repeat this two more times, depleting many of the camels cargo. Then, the scoring is another matter in itself. You score points for each good you have left. The value of each commodity is equal to the number of goods of that commodity that were stolen earlier in the game. Phew. When we started, we had a full coffeepot and no one was complaining of a headache. Soon into the first round, we found that as usual we couldn’t even remember where the thieves were hidden when we had that information in our hand just a few seconds ago! All of us managed to escape the first round in pretty good shape. Then, in the second round, we all took perilous nosedives. Scott T and Brian both landed on thieves that stole 3 (or 4!) of the goods from their camels. Luckily for them, they both landed on thieves that they did not ever get to see the information for. Dale, on the other hand, just simply forgot where the bad thieves were and plunked a camel on a thief that wiped out an entire camel. Thanks for playing. The third round was pretty quiet since we each had a few camels with almost no goods on them. As such, these quickly went onto the thief spaces so the theives couldn’t do much damage. When the dust settled, Brian eked out a close victory. Brian 153, Scott 151, Dale 142. Rated 6/10. Would be higher if I didn’t get a headache from it, or if I didn’t suck so bad at it. 4. Reibach & Co. Having received
a phone call from Luke announcing to us that he had just woken up and would
be at the house shortly, we chose a quick card game to pass the time.
Brian had never played Reibach and Co. and wanted to find out what it was
all about. It also kept to our previous theme (Reibach and Co = Get
the Goods). This game is a set collecting game at its heart with
the novelty of the Wertung scoring system. This system, oft used
by Alan Moon, involves a number of Wertung cards added to the deck.
In Reibach and Co., scoring is triggered by the 4th, 7th, and 10th Wertung
card appearance. The effect of this system is that you never really
know when the scoring is going to happen leading to some deliciously tense
play choices as scoring nears. Also, you never really know when the
end of the game will be since the game ends with the 10th Wertung card
and not with the last card in the deck. In short, in Reibach, you
try to have the most control of 10 industries (by playing the most cards
in that industry). Each turn, you have 3 actions where you can play
cards to the table or draw from among 3 face up cards (2 actions to draw
face down cards). When the scoring comes around, 3 million bucks
to whomever has the most in each suit and 1 million to second place.
The scores can be doubled by playing Risk cards to each suit – these double
all payoffs but prohibit any more cards from being
5. World Cup Tournament Football Game Time to play my newest acquisition, the “World Cup Tournament Football” Game – straight from Austrailia. Though now woefully out of date given the World Cup’s new format of 32 teams, it’s still a fun and chaotic romp thru a soccer tournament. In this game, each player takes control of a number of Football (Soccer for us Yanks) sides (teams for us yanks) and plays thru the world cup tournament. Each side has a baseline value in goals and penalty kicks which handicaps the sides from the start. Teams were chosen from the ’90 Italia lineup and placed into their groups. If you want to play a historical game with this game, I would suggest the ’86 or ’90 World Cups as the team ratings are most similar to the actual abilities at that time in history. Conveniently, the game does offer both entrants and results for every world cup in modern history up to ’90. We chose an open tournament where the 24 teams are laid out and each player in turn was allowed to draft whatever team he wanted. Once the teams were chosen, game play starts. On each turn, each player plays 2 cards: one to the group phase on the board and one to the knockout stage of the board. (To those not familiar with the World Cup, the initial stage of the tournament involved six separate round robins of four teams in the “group phase” from which 16 teams emerged to play in a traditional one-and-out format in the “knockout phase”). I know this sounds complicated, but it’s nowhere near as byzantine as the current UEFA Champions League / UEFA Cup schedule, the Aussie Rules Football Finals schedule, or some of the qualification processes involved in just getting to the World Cup where things such as “the 9th best 2nd place team from Europe will have a playoff with the 5th best team from Asia to have the right to play the best team from Oceania (always Australia) for one stinking spot in the World Cup”. Anyways,
back to the game… Each card played has a number for goals and a number
for penalty kicks. Once there are 3 cards played for each group match
(which will still leave many cards to be played in the knockout phase),
the games are resolved. Each team adds the goals on their cards to
the goals that they started with and then the winners move on. Then,
having only the knockout games to finish, each player plays one card at
a time until each match there has 3 cards on each side. The true
subtlety of this game comes in the playing of cards in the second phase.
You have to anticipate where you think your teams will advance into the
knockout tournament so you can play good cards on the spaces you think
your teams will be (or bad cards on the spaces where their opponents will
be!) This strategy can easily backfire on you though, if the team
you expected to come out of the group in first place does not (or if a
behemoth like Germany ends up being one of the 3rd place teams that advances!)
6. Payoff
This is a little Ideal game from the mid 70s that Luke picked up at _my_ thrift store. (There used to be one great thrift store in the center of town where I’d go to get some good buys about once a month. Among my successes here are a complete 1962 3M Acquire, a bulk lot of 10 3M/AH bookshelf games for 5 bucks, Fortress America for a buck, the Original Castle Risk in mint condition, etc. Anyways, I made the mistake of mentioning it once in the game group and now I’m always beaten to the good stuff by either Luke or Ed… Not that I’m sore about it or anything! Just so, that’s how I missed out on this “gem” – I use the term quite loosely!) This game consists of a bunch of marbles (white worth 1 pt, black worth 5 pt and red worth 10 pt) and a mechanical tower made up of 6 interlocking plastic levels. Each level has some randomly placed holes. Each level can twist clockwise or counterclockwise thus creating many possible paths for the marbles to take from top to bottom. So in this “game of judgment and intuition”, each player starts with 10 points worth of marbles. The excess marbles are then dumped in the top of the column – with the one red 10 pt marble going in last. Then, each player takes turns consisting of depositing any number of marbles in the top and then twisting the columns a number of times equal to the points of marbles added in the top. The player then keeps any marbles that tumble out of the column due to the twisting. The winner is the first person to 25 points. Not surprisingly, in the first game, Brian got the red marble and quickly went on to win. In my experience, the red marble winner wins the game about 2/3 of the time. Just to prove that point, the second game was won by Luke – who did not have the red marble. As I won neither, it just goes to show you that I really have neither any judgment nor intuition. Rated 7/10. Not a bad buy for 95 cents, but would have been better if it were in my basement! 8. Inkognito Scott had
to go, so we moved on to Inkognito. This game has been described
many times before so I won’t get into this one. The game ended up
“broken”, as it often does, because of some inconsistencies in passing
cards. I had not made it clear in my rules explanation that you could
pass one of your actual identity/aspect/mission cards as part of a card
pass, nor did I fully explain that traditionally we allow the actual card
to count as the “one true card” expected in each bundle of cards. Due to
this, Luke made some erroneous assumptions about my identity that allowed
my brother and I to walk away with the win when Luke wrongly thought he
had won. I’ve played this one about 7 times now and the majority
of them have ended unsatisfactorily such as this game did. (Similar
to a game of Black Vienna gone bad because someone couldn’t
9. Evergreen As Ed showed up, we had five people and the only game we hadn’t yet played that would handle five was Evergreen. Why this game is so maligned still baffles me. Each time that I play it, I find it enjoyable. In this game each player tries to manipulate 6 different records and take advantage of their popularity to score points. Cards (1-13 in 6 suits) are used to control the songs. Each player is dealt 13 cards – these are the only cards that the player will get the entire game! Each player chooses 3 cards to place face up and are revealed simultaneously. The totals for each color are added up and whoever has the highest total in each color gets the scoring marker for that particular color (song). Each scoring marker starts a value of 5 and can increase as high as 12 (then back down to 5…). Each time the marker changes hands (whenever someone new has the current highest total for that color), its value increases by one step. On a players turn, which is time constrained by a sand timer, a player may play one to three cards – on either his own cards or on top of opponent’s cards. Each player will have ONLY three cards in front of them – if a new card is played, it goes on top of the old card. After playing cards, the player gets to choose if he wants to score or not. Each player declares three scoring rounds during the course of the game (at his/her will) and there is a final scoring at the end of the game. In addition, the player can name any one of his scorings to be double – but this has to be done when the scoring occurs, not in retrospect at the end of the game. Scores are calculated by adding up the number on all of the scoring markers you have in front of you at that time. The game moves quickly and ends in 30 minutes or so. The game ends when all players are out of cards – this is quite variable because each player has the choice to play from one to three cards per round. There is a definite advantage to having cards near the end to play. Dale, Brian and Paul got out to early leads as they used their first scoring opportunity as their Gala (or doubled) score. As the game moved on, Brian quickly found himself out of cards – he had played multiple cards each round and soon was out of them. Though he was the leader after each player had elected to score three times, he was unable to play any more cards and lost all his scoring markers by the end of the game (thus scoring zero for his last score). Ed, who was waiting for the perfect opportunity to double his score, ended up waiting too long and had to double a paltry 9 at the end of the game. Luke ended up victorious in this one (not surprisingly, he also had 2 cards left to play at the end when the rest of us were all out). Rated 9/10. It’s quick and tense and fun. I think that most complaints about there not being enough control in this game stem from people not taking enough advantage of playing cards onto other people. 10. Lowenherz Finally, to end the day, we broke out the best game (and most often ignored) in the Teuber exploration trilogy, Lowenherz. As I’m getting tired of typing, you’ll have to look somewhere else for a synopsis of game play. For the game at hand, I was the only one who had played before, so after a detailed rules explanation – we quickly set off. Early in the game, Luke set up shop in one corner and continued to expand one area greatly. So quickly that the neighboring areas were not able to compete in knights to stop the outward flow of the area. Ed took an expand slowly and draw lots of politics card strategy while Dale and Brian took up their usual “just try to screw the sibling over” strategy. The game was pretty even for most of the first half (except that Luke was way ahead pointwise) – but the scores started to even out as the other players started to enclose in their own areas. In the endgame, my previous experience prevailed as I was able to push into a few vital areas and take control of a number of towns on the board by the end of the game. This coupled with my advantage in mines that I had held during the entire game pushed me over the top in the final scoring. When I had first learned the game, I was taught incorrectly that the action cards (to decide which action to take) were all played face down simultaneously and then once revealed, conflicts were resolved. After reading the rules for my previous play of Lowenherz, I found out the correct way – the starting player plays face up and so on around the table. Having played each way a number of times, I’m not sure which is better. I think that each version of choosing actions adds its own strategy and tension to the choice. Anyways, rated 8/10 using the official rules. (Usually 9/10 when using my blind bidding variant). Report by Dale Yu - top |
| October 4-6, 2002
Buckeye Gamefest III hosted by Columbus Area Boardgame Society (CABS) Gamers in attendance: Luke H, John P, Jeff F, Ted C Some of us journeyed north to Columbus for a weekend of gaming organized by CABS. Luke and I were there all weekend and Jeff and Ted put in appearances. Luke won the most games in the "Eurogames" category over the weekend. Games we played included Vino, Puerto Rico, Funkenschlag, Acquire, Union Pacific, The Lord of the Rings Cardgame, Die Handler, the life boat game, Sant Fe Rails, China Town, Liar's Dice, For Sale. There were also miniatures and wargames (CABS has a big wargame contingent) and an auction and raffle. Prizes were donated by GMT and Rio Grande. Report by John P - top |
| September 28th, 2002
impromptu session hosted by Matt H. Gamers in attendance: Matt H, Jenny, John P Games played:
Full report from Matt coming soon - JP - top |
| September 7th, 2002
monthly session hosted by John P. Gamers in attendance: Mike, Dale, Luke, John P, John Mc, Scott & Cheryl, Matt G, Matt H, Jeff, Joe The day
began early with Dale, Luke, Mike and John P gathering for their first
ever game of Roads and Boats. Luke easily won as he was left alone
for most of the game. Dale and John P tried cooperating but Mike
and Dale got into a distracting wall build/destroy competition. Luke
360, Dale 210, John P 97, Mike 38.
Initially Matt and I got into a battle for Pharoahs, and both of us had a significant number of Niles/Floods as well. Joe was low man on Pharoahs, and shut out of technologies, so started far behind. In the second scoring round, I benefitted from being the last player with a bid tile, so put a total of 7 tiles on the track before I took them. That gave me a big lead, but Matt had accumulated a significant number of Monuments, so I was still worried about the last scoring round. In the last round Matt scored early, because the bid track was filling up with Ra tiles. He left Joe and I to bid it out for the last couple of rounds. I scored a few Monumernts and Niles, with the game ultimately coming down to a 55-55 tie between Matt and I, with me getting the tiebreaker because I had the largest bid token (13), which I hadn't been able to spend because the bid track had filled up! A great, closely contested game. - Jeff Sumera was
won by Joe over Jeff, Dale and John P.
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| August 2nd, 2002
monthly session hosted by Matt & Linda Gamers in attendance: Matt & Linda, John & Leslie, Dale, John P, John Mc, Luke, Cal, Rick, Mike, Matt H. I only kept track of games I played in so this is not a complete list. Pizarro & Co was played by Matt, Linda, Leslie, John, John P. and Dale. This is a game of auctions, auctions and more auctions. As European royalty, you bid on the services of 6 famous explorers. Each win gives you some bonus (victory points, cards, etc). John P. came out on top in this one. Next up was a Luke's thrift store find of Games Magazines game of the Year for 1995(?), Sharp Shooters. This is a cross between Yahtzee and Can't Stop. It was played by Luke, John Mc, Matt, Leslie, Linda and John P. I don't know who won. The same group then tackled TransAmerica. Again I don't know who won, but Leslie and John P. ran through the barrier and off the board into the ocean to end the game. We then split up and Luke, Leslie, Linda and John P. played Cairo, a new flicking game. It is kind of interesting, in that the die roll determines movement and which finger to use for flicking, but it's not my cup of tea. Luke won rather handily. Next up were two card games, Where's Bob's Hat? and Land Unter. Luke and John P. then played Doris and Frank's Igel Argern (Hedgehogs in a hurry). Luke won. Luke, John and John P. played Dschunke. Luke won. Luke and John started a game of Robo Rally which Luke would have won, but it got late so we stopped and went home. Respectfully submitted - JP - top |
| July 31st, 2002
impromptu session hosted by Luke Luke acquired
some more thrift store finds, so Wade, Luke and I got together to play.
Keeping alive my win streak of games that require little or no skill I
won Topple, Sharp Shooters and Stay Alive. We then moved to the much
meatier Funkenschlag which Luke won by $12 over me then Wade.
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| July 26th, 2002
impromptu session hosted by Scott & Cheryl An informal gathering as Luke wanted to play his new copy of Die Handler and I wanted to compare Santa Fe to Santa Fe Rails for an article for Counter Magazine. The games were Die Handler (won b |