board games & card games for all ages

Thursday 8th March 2007

Another fun night at the shop, with 11 players coming out to play.

Players:

Andy, Darren, Dave H, Jack, Jen, Mark L, Mike, Neil, Nick, Russ, Sue

Games Played:

Klunker

We gave Mark the choice of an opening game, and he opted for this one, which has become a fairly regular opener on Thursdays ....

Mark:    21
Nick:    18
Sue:    9
Mike:    8

Another fun outing for this clever little card game. Mark and I seemed to benefit greatly from very nice deals, with Mark actually opening the game with a set of four that he had received! Grabbing first choice in the final buying round, he bought the only cards that would have helped me, and secured his victory by leaving me with nothing decent to add to my collection!

TurfMaster

Suddenly we were up to 8 players, and I suggested this one (I'm a big fan of racing games). It got the vote of approval, and before you new it we were under starters orders ...

Andy:    (50 + 30 + 7th)    80
Nick:    (5th + 50 + 10)    60
Mark:    (10 + 8th + 50)    60
Mike:    (20 + 6th + 20)    40
Sue:    (30 + 5th + 8th)    30
Russ:    (7th + 7th + 30)    30
Darren:    (8th + 20 + 5th)    20
Jen:    (6th + 10 + 6th)    10

This was a load of fun, and everyone got into the racing spirit. The races were all incredibly close, which made for some very tense moments. The third race was over fences, which initially panicked all the jockeys, but in fact we all got round without a single faller!

Oasis 

Meanwhile, the three remaining players had arrived, and disappeared upstairs with a copy of Oasis.

(Camels + Oases + Steppes + Plains)

Dave:    (105 + 100 + 15 + 14)    234
Neil:    (7 + 36 + 160 + 24)    227
Jack:    (108 + 1 + 7 + 72)    188

This is an excellent game with five players, although reports from this game were that it certainly loses something with just three. A good win for Dave, nevertheless.

Urland

For the third consecutive games night, this new Shire Gamers favourite makes it to the table ...

Darren:    34
Sue:    25
Mark:    23
Andy:    22
Nick:    15

Darren led this game pretty much from start to finish, aided by his excellent parenting skills and a turbo swimming gene, allowing him to populate the sea very quickly and swim to land in droves. Everyone else was fairly close on his tail until the end, except for me! I only managed to advance a total of 11 spaces in the whole game, aided by some bad decisions and the worst run of luck (honest). I think I needed to be a bit more free with my bidding, and get myself more genetic improvements!

The Totally Renamed Spy Game

Meanwhile upstairs, the remaining four players managed to get in a couple of games of Before I Kill you, Mr Bond this one:

Game 1

Neil:    18
Russ:    8
Mike:    8
Jen:    0 (not even a lair!)

Game 2

Neil:    33 (and an early win)
Jen:    16
Russ:    12

Not much is known about these two games, although it looks like Neil pretty much had things under control! 

Saboteur

And finally .... the six of us remaining finished up with the standard Shire Gamers closer. As we were down to only six players, we decided to play a couple of extra rounds to make sure we got a winner ...

Jen:    13
Mark:    8
Russ:    8
Andy:    5
Nick:    4
Sue:    0

This was a bizarre game of Saboteur! We had honest dwarves going bad, just because they got picked on. We had saboteurs helping to dig in the right direction, only to undo their work themselves later on. Sue suffered a little early on, as she was the sole saboteur in the first two rounds. Jen found the gold in the first two rounds, grabbing as much as she could for herself, before turning saboteur from that point on and stopping us getting any more treasure. Thirteen is an awful lot of gold, even when you play five rounds of this one!

And all that sabateuriality was all there was for another Thursday in the shop. Thanks to everyone for coming along once again.