board games & card games for all ages

board games & card games for all ages

Thursday 8th June 2006

Ten people through the doors this week, on a very warm evening ...

Players:

Dave, Jen, Kev, Mark L, Mitch, Nick, Russ, Sam, Sue, Tim

Games Played:

Winner's Circle

After a couple of false starts (Mykerinos and Boomtown were abandoned due to extra people walking in), we went off to the races for a 6-player game of this re-release of the excellent Royal Turf. 

Tim:    $1,650
Dave:    $1,600
Mitch:    $1,550
Sue:    $1,500
Nick:    $1,300
Mark:    $1,250

First impressions of the new version were very good. The game turned out to be very close - we have no idea whether this is co-incidence or not. The races appear closer as well, and I think this is due to the fact that you can have several horses with the same "basic" score. A lot of fun was had, and Tim won by a nose, mainly due to getting a couple of timely choices for which horse crossed the line.

John Silver

Meanwhile, the remaining four players turned up, so I sent them upstairs with this little brain-melting card game.  Because I'm like that.

Sam:    35
Jen:    20
Russ:    10
Kev:    6

A pretty comprehensive victory for Sam, while Kev was on a mission to try and collect all the treasure maps. (Treasure maps are bad!)

Cleopatra & the Society of Architects

This one came out for the second week running, with five players going building a palace in Egypt ...

Jen:    40    (4 corruption)
Mark:    39    (1)
Sue:    34    (3)
Mitch:    30    (0)
Tim:    47    (5 ... one too many and fed to the crocs.)

This was a much less corrupt game than last week, with 5 being enough to have you fed to the crocodiles. Jen just got in by a single point, at the same time only being a single point away from death. A narrow victory! 

Pirate's Cove

Meanwhile upstairs, it was off to the high seas for some (particularly poor efforts at) piracy.

Russ:    36
Sam:    34
Dave:    32
Kev:    32
Nick:    11

A good win for Russ in a very tight contest. Oddly, it was Kev that started poorly and looked out of it from the beginning, but I soon managed to take over and wrestle that position from him. Dave got himself a 6-gun parrot, which made the rest of us (apart from me) give him a wide berth. My master plan of a surprise attack on the legendary pirates failed to work, and secured my spot in Davy Jones' locker.

Circus Flohcati

Cleo was done a little ahead of Pirate's Cove, and sop the downstairs crowd went off to the circus.

Jen:    58
Tim:    57
Sue:    54
Mark:    51
Mitch:    41

Another pretty successful game for Jen, and another narrow victory!

Saboteur

Our closer of choice when the numbers are right (in this case 9), we all went dwarven mining and had a great time underground

Mark:    11
Russ:    9
Nick:    6
Mitch:    3
Jen:    3
Kev:    2
Sue:    0
Tim:    0
Dave:    0

Two out of three successes for the Saboteurs in this one, with Mark and Russ the only dwarves to come out with three wins. Dave had us all fooled in the first round, as he had him pegged for a Saboteur and heaped loads of broken equipment on him, only to find out he was a happy dwarf!

And that was an excellent way to end the night ... lots of laughs in a very simple card game! Thanks again those who came along.