board games & card games for all ages
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Monday 25th June 2007
Nine gamers in the pub this week, which was pretty good considering how wet it was (outside, that is, not in the pub) ...
Players:
David F-F, Faye, Mark L, Mel, Neil C, Nick, Rich, Sue, Tim
Games Played:
The first four of us had a quick three rounds of this fun little opener (aka The Bucket King) while we were waiting to see who was coming along ...
Rich:
(5 + 0 + 6) 11
Sue: (3 + 4 +
1) 8
Nick: (5 + 1 + 1) 7
Neil: (0 + 4 + 0) 4
This is always a good game to start with; fun, but evil enough to make some enemies early on in the evening! Rich claimed a fairly comfortable victory, despite being completely wiped out in the middle round. Sue and I managed to never get our pyramids completely destroyed, with Neil taking the other two hits, but we were never far away from death ourselves!
We were now up to five, and decided on another quickie, which was supposed to last five rounds, but could be stopped early in the case of new arrivals. In the end, we managed to get three rounds in. (This game has an English version, known as Zing!)
Neil:
(0 + 0 + 0) 0
Nick: (6 + 2 +
4) 12
Rich: (8 + 4 + 0) 12
Mel: (2 + 2 + 9) 13
Sue: (3 + 9 + 13)
22
Low score wins, by the way. Neil took the Saboteur role in the first round, and did a pretty good job of forcing tricks onto players who didn't want them. In the second round, Rich tried to do the same, but in fact we had overbid, which makes it much harder for the Saboteur to force extra tricks on you, and the points we scored were because we hadn't won enough of them! In round three, no one took up the Saboteur challenge, but we overbid by miles again, leaving several of us short of the tricks we needed. Well played by Neil, scoring a pretty impressive 0 penalty points in three hands!
We were now up to eight players, and so split into two groups of four. This was one of the choices ....
Nick:
49
Mel: 46
Sue: 41
Faye: 35
This was another fun game of Pillars, which never fails to be enjoyable. It was a first play for Mel, but the rest of us had played before. I tried only spending my resources when I had more than five, and carrying the rest over to the next round when my Craftsmen may have improved - This worked quite well! There was a three-way battle for metal, which I tried to stay out of, and then Sue decided to sell all her metal in the final round, converting it into points instead. I have taken a couple of points off my final score, as I have a sneaky feeling I may have sold a couple of stone in the market in the final round when I wasn't allowed to, which earned me 8 gold, which I then converted to two points. I don't think it affected the outcome though.
This one hadn't seen the table in a little while, and was chosen by the other group of four ...
Mark:
7
Neil: 4
Rich: 3
David: 2
This turned out to be quite a long game, with Mark eventually having to get the full seven Princesses in his palace, as he couldn't find the ones with the right skills. He was also having some trouble getting camels early on in the game (although they would have been very nice camels, apparently. So ... it may have cost him a fortune, but he managed to pull off a fairly comfortable win.
As the Pillars game finished a little before the other, there was time for those four players and Tim to go off to Venice and drain some swamps ...
Nick:
36
Sue: 33
Tim: 32
Faye: 26
Mel: 25
This game finished surprisingly quickly, with all the houses being built while we were only a little over halfway round the scoring track. I still haven't worked out the best strategy for this one, but I tried to contribute to buildings wherever possible, just trying to not let the same person be Master Builder all the time. This kept me moving round the track, but Tim was always just in front of me. However, Sue built the last house to grab a couple of extra points, nicking second place from Tim, who had cashed in all his gold a turn earlier, so he couldn't buy any points to get back at me. Mel desperately tried to pass Faye's gondola before the game ended, but stopped one place short.
And those five games were all we managed to squeeze in this week. Thanks to everyone for coming out in the monsoon.
