board games & card games for all ages

board games & card games for all ages

Thursday 28th September 2006

Everyone with the same initials turned up this week, just to make the scorekeeper's job as difficult as possible. A total of 13 people, but including no less than 6 first-timers!

Players:

Alex B, Alex W, Andrew, Andy, Annelies, Cornel, Dave H, Gordon, Mark L, Nick, Nicky, Sue, Tim

Games Played:

Ra

The first guys in started to set up this one, so I ran around like an idiot for a bit, trying to tidy up in time to join them.

Nick:    50
Alex B:    32
Andrew:    29
Andy:    28

This is not a game I win very often, but it is one of my favourites. I was pretty sure that it was still close, so quite pleasantly surprised by the winning margin, although it's slightly false as the 10-point swing at the end went to me and from Alex, making the difference bigger than it really was.

Intrigue

While we were busy in Egypt, the next guys through the door went upstairs with this evil little game to be nasty to each other ....

Cornel:    119,000
Gordon:    105,000
Mark:    99,000
Dave:    90,000
Annelies:    80,000

I don't know a lot about this one, although the people involved are still talking to each other, so no serious back-stabbing seems to have been done!

Diamant

While we were waiting for Intrigue to finish upstairs, the (now) seven of us went off to mine some gems ...

Game One: 

Andrew:    35
Nick:    21
Sue:    19
Alex W:    15
Alex B:    9
Nicky:    8
Andy:    7

Game Two:

Andy:    35
Alex B:    34
Sue:    31
Nicky:    23
Alex W:    19
Nick:    8
Andrew:    3

As official scorer, I have decided not to combine the two scores. If we had done, Sue would have come out on top with 50 gems, and we don't need to know who would have come last!

California

All 12 of us were finished at the same time, and so we split into three groups of four. This was the quickest of the three games chosen:

Sue:    23
Gordon:    22
Annelies:    19
Alex B:    17

I don't know anything about this one. As usual for California, a pretty close contest.

Ys

A special request from Cornel, we decided to have a game of this excellent bidding game, which we hadn't played in quite a while ...

Mark:    96
Nick:    79
Cornel:    67
Nicky:    57

Mark somehow managed to get a whole load more gems than the rest of us, giving him a little bit of a runaway lead, although he only started to really stretch away in the final stages. Embarrassingly (for the rest of us), we also let him get more black-market gems than anyone else too!

Pirate's Cove

The other game of the trio was a trip to the Caribbean (possibly) for a quick sail round the islands and some buccaneering

Andrew:    37
Andy:    37
Dave:    35
Alex W:    27

Another pretty close game, with only 10 points separating the group. The tie-breaker is usually a fight to the death, but sadly this was only noticed after boats were being returned to their moorings. Andy conceded the game to Andrew, as he was pretty sure he would have lost the scrap anyway!

Take Stock

The California game finished a little before the other two, and so a couple of rounds of this new release were played to fill in the gap.

Sue:    (134 + 102)    236
Annelies:    (129 + 63)    192
Tim:    (108 + 84)    292
Alex B:    (84 + 61)    145

Don't know much about this one, apart from what you see there. Considering how many points you can score, a tie for second is probably quite unusual!

Saboteur

And finally .... what else? We lost a few players, but 9 survived for a trip down the mine ...

Alex B:    6 Gold
Mark:    6
Nick:    5
Annelies:    5
Dave:    3
Andy:    3
Cornel:    1
Sue:    0
Tim:    0

No-one managed three wins, as the Saboteurs triumphed twice in the three rounds played. Mark made up for last week's disaster (being an honest Saboteur) by sharing a victory with Alex.

And that was that as midnight rolled round. Nice to see so many new faces in ... let's hope we see them again!