board games & card games for all ages

board games & card games for all ages

Thursday 31st August 2006

A nice round 10 people in tonight (round number ... not round people). Again a couple of new faces mixed in the the old (again, not the people ...). We'll be in trouble when all Shire Gamers past & present decide to turn up at the same time one of these weeks!

Players:

Andy, David, Jen, Jo, Mark H, Nick, Paul, Russ, Simon, Sue

Games Played:

Ra

There were five of us in, and we thought we'd get straight on with something while waiting for any others. This hadn't hit the table in a while, and four of the five of us knew what we were doing (or so we thought) ...

Andy:    41
Sue:    22
Simon:    21
David:    20
Nick:    18

Guess who hadn't played before? Yep ... we went easy on Andy, as it was his first game. I wish we had! Andy pretty much wiped the floor with all of us, spending heavily in the first round to grab the Pharaoh lead, which was never taken from him. We also let him have a "free" run at the tiles in the final round, in which he managed to grab a full 8 without an appearance from Ra. Personally, I was just pleased to end the game with more than I started with!

Cleopatra & the Society of Architects

All of a sudden, we were up to 10 people, and split into two groups. The upstairs crowd stuck with an Egyptian theme, and went building a big palace.

Andy:    46
David:    39
Jen:    37
Jo:    37
Simon:    38, but fed to the crocs, with 10 corruption!

Sadly, I don't know much about this one. Simon was a few ahead on corruption, with the next highest being 6 (two players). Andy takes his second straight win of the evening.

La Città

Meanwhile downstairs, the remaining five of us went city-building in the Italian countryside in a bit of an epic game. We were only half way through when the Architects came down the stairs looking for something else to play!

(Population + Bonuses)

Mark:    (30 + 3)    33
Nick:    (23 + 6)    29
Sue:    (22 + 6)    28
Russ:    (23 + 3)    26
Paul:    (19 + 3)    22

Mark took a stronghold quite early on, by concentrating on one city primarily. By the end of the sixth year, his one large city had over 20,000 civilians in it, while his other two were leaking people and losing buildings, but still producing enough food for him to survive. I was quite surprised to grab second spot, as I had some famine troubles during years 3 and 4, causing me to lose a couple of thousand people and - more importantly - a couple of actions! Everyone seemed to have a very enjoyable game, despite the 2+ hours!

Border Reivers

After Cleopatra, four of the architects went off to the English/Scottish border lands for a little army-building and warfare. This game was demonstrated by the designer, Jackson Pope, at The Cast are Dice the other week.

Andy:    40 Coins
Simon:    35
Jen:    27
David:    19

Another fine win for Andy in a game which I also know very little about. This put Andy three for three on the night, and time was running short!

Saboteur

And finally ... after running out of time last week, the seven remaining players settled back into the traditional Shire Gamers closer!

Andy:    7
Sue:    6
Nick:    6
Russ:    4
Jen:    3
Simon:    3
David:    1

We couldn't stop him. In what was actually a closer game than the scores suggest, Andy managed to prevail by being the dwarf who discovered the treasure in round one. No-one won or lost all three rounds, so the scores were bound to be pretty close. David and Russ actually both only won once, but David was the unlucky honest dwarf who only received one card in the first round when the other three of us received two. Actually ... thinking about it ... someone did win all three rounds: Sue was on the winning side three times, but sadly finished the first round with a broken pickaxe, meaning she picked up no gold. After that, she turned traitor and did much better! 

And that was everything for another week. Thanks again to those that braved the rain and came along.