board games & card games for all ages

Monday 12th March 2007

Another pub night, and this time we had 8 players come along ....

Players:

Cath, David F-F, Gordon, Mark L, Nick, Rich, Sue, Tim

Games Played:

Mykerinos

The first three in decided to play this great little opener.

Mark:    69
Sue:    54
Nick:    39

This is a game that we should play a lot more often than we do. Mark was in the museum early, and booked a lot of the rooms, whereas I was concentrating on getting as many cubes as possible from my patrons. As it turns out, it seems the museum strategy works much better!

M

We were up to four players, and so another quickie was in order while we waited for others. This time, it was the excellent abstract game M:

(chips + tiles - excess tiles)

Nick:    (80 + 250 - 80)    250
Gordon:    (70 + 190 - 40)    220
Mark:    (60 + 130 - 50)    140
Sue:    (30 + 140 - 80)    90

This is a great abstract tile game which is another one that doesn't get as much play as it should. I found myself in the position to score a lot of rows, which kept getting me the tiles I needed to boost my score. Luckily a couple of times this forced bad tiles on the rest of the group, which was nice! 

Urland

Yet again (for the fourth games night running), this great dino game made it to the table. I promise not to bring it on Thursday!

Mark:    32
Gordon:    29
Sue:    27
Nick:    25
David:    23

This was a pretty close game yet again, although it took me some time to get moving from my start position. I had the most guys to bid with at the first mutation phase, but was still too stingy to actually win a new gene! Gordon made excellent use of his "turbo" gene to run Mark close, but we just couldn't manage to catch him, despite Mark not having any new genes at all!

Experiment

While Urland was going on, the three remaining arrivals went off to the lab to try and mix some coloured flasks and come up with the right results ...

Tim:    17
Rich:    13
Cath:    9

Despite this game taking place on the adjacent table, I don't know much about how the game actually went. I didn't hear any of the customary groans that usually accompany players picking up the broken flasks and explosions, so maybe there wasn't too much gambling on the face-down cards going on. A solid win for Tim in this one.

Detroit-Cleveland Grand Prix

By request, Gordon had brought this fun little bidding/racing game along ...

Sue:    $500,000
Gordon:    $470,000
Mark:    $440,000
Nick:    $290,000

Hmm ... this result could make you think that I wasn't really in the game. Well ... you'd be right! I think I overbid for ownership of the cars in the first two races, and I was desperate to own two cars, which doesn't necessarily seem to be the best idea, as trying to do well with two cars is quite tricky. So .... for the third race, I made sure I only bought one ... and then did very badly with that one as well! It was a very close contest between the other three players though, with Sue edging out the opposition by just a few thousand dollars.

Big City

The other four players went city building in this gorgeous (and slightly over-produced) game of building residences, businesses and trams:

David:    97
Tim:    75
Cath:    59
Rich:    40

This was a new game to everyone, and so required a few rules checks to get it underway. It's so long since I have played, that I wasn't much help to the group when asked a question or two! David managed to build a shopping center, which gave him a big leap in points and secured him a good victory.

Ra

Thinking we had enough time left over for a quick game of Ra, we jumped straight into it ....

Sue:    43
Mark:    41
Nick:    40
David:    19

We ended up being under a lot of time pressure to get this one done, and the third epoch went in a bit of a blur as we were being ushered out the door! David ended up taking the last set of tiles earlier than he would have liked, just to end the game, but I don't think he'd have managed to pull his score up by enough if we'd had a little more time! The game was won and lost by the suns at the end, as Mark (lowest) handed five points to Sue (highest) to give her the win in a pretty tight game.

And that was all we had time for this week. Thanks to everyone for coming along again, and we hope to see you all next week!