board games & card games for all ages
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Monday 9th July 2007
Another group of six players for a Monday, and another chance to play a longer game, keeping in one big group (which is great, as I only have a few scores to write up!)
Players:
David F-F, Mark L, Neil C, Nick, Rich, Sue
Games Played:
The first three in thought we'd have a crack at this new arrival ....
Mark:
$113
Nick: $85
Sue: $82
This was quite a fun little game, with a little more going on than it first seemed. The rules are pretty short, and your choices each turn are quite simple, and yet it mixes together quite well. Deciding when to spend your worms and grab the card you really need is quite important, and something which we all were getting to grips with about half way through the game. Mark grabbed a few of the double cards, all of which he managed to sell for a decent amount, which moved him significantly ahead of Sue and I, who decided to have a battle for second!
There was now five of us, and so we opted for another quickie, just to make sure no one else was coming along ...
Mark:
10
Sue: 8
David: 5
Neil: 5
Nick: 1
This is always a fun romp around the dungeon, trying to set yourself up for some easy treasure. I was dealt a handful of gold coin rooms, and so I was (unsuccessfully) trying to separate myself from the others. Neil was in the same boat, but he did manage to wander off in a completely different direction; however, while he was doing this, we'd all managed to pick up a couple of coins while Neil was still skint. However, then the "lose a coin" and "steal a coin" cards started to appear, and soon we were all pretty much back where we started (well ... I certainly was!). In the end, Sue and Mark were both sat with a stack of four coins, and Mark pulled a 3, making his stack worth a total of 10. Lots of fun, as usual.
Rich arrived (just in time), and so the six of us went to explore the New World ...
David:
75
Nick: 71
Sue: 65
Neil: 65
Mark: 51
Rich: 48
This game took the rest of the night, as it can be a bit of an epic with 6 players. A very good game, which was interesting in the fact that no one thought they were doing very well! Rich went for the capital buildings, which is usually a good strategy, and soon he was generating a load of cash, allowing him to buy more buildings! However, he was fairly under-represented in the New World. Mark had a failed expedition quite early on, which put him back a little. Neil was the man after the cash, grabbing loads of the trade goods and an early ship, giving him a large income (which the sugar refinery made even larger). David, Sue and I was throwing an awful lot of colonists and missionaries onto the boat and populating the New World as much as we could. The theory that if I could get a big enough lead in a couple of the new lands, people would leave me alone seemed to be working well, and I secretly had a feeling I was doing ok. However ... in the very final round, my party of four explorers encountered five natives in a far flung land, and they all died a horrible death. In the meantime, everyone else's parties pulled off a successful exploration (earning between 4 and 6 points each). Then, right at the very end, David announced that a couple of his Settlers had decided to move into one of my provinces and steal my majority (despite me trying to persuade him he would get more points elsewhere), and that took four points from me and gave them to David. All in all, another great game of this one, and a very good win for David.
And that one took us a little beyond closing time, so we hastily disappeared out the back door.
