board games & card games for all ages
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Monday 26th November 2007
A bit of a busier pub this week with eight of us in, making quite a lot of noise to make up for last week's quiet ...
Players:
David
F-F, Gordon, Haydn, Lesley, Mark L, Nick, Rich, Sue
Games Played:
A fairly standard opener for the three of us while we waited for the others ...
Mark: 11
Nick: 6
Sue: 4
This was actually a little closer than it looks, as I was 9-8 ahead before Mark stole my best gold coin and grabbed the win. Quite a short game as well, as everyone had hands full of coin and steal tiles!
We were now up to four, and decided on another quickie ....
Rich:
59
Nick: 57
Mark: 55
Sue: 52
This was a remarkably close game. Rich was well ahead at the half-way stage, as he was the only player to manage a group larger than 4 caravans. However, this did mean that he was blocked out of a lot in the second half, as we all placed our double-caravans to try and get as large a group as possible. As we counted the scores from back to front, each player just pipped the one before him, with Rich taking the game by a couple of points at the end.
We were now up to 8 players, and split into two groups for a couple of longer games ...
Mark:
16 Cities
Nick: 14 Cities (€159)
Gordon: 14 Cities (€156)
Sue: 14 Cities
(€142)
This was a bit of a weird game. We added the new Power Plants, which took a little getting used to - and we were so intent on doing it right, that we got a couple of things wrong! For the first couple of rounds, we forgot to remove the highest plant to the bottom of the deck, and we completely ignored the new 46 and 50 plants, mistakenly thinking that they shouldn't be included. Once the game was underway, we quickly raced up to 5 or 6 cities each, but then the game stalled as no one wanted to pay the extortionate cost of a seventh, due to the fact that it would be way out west when we all started in the east! So what happened was Step 3 immediately followed Step 1, and suddenly we all had loads of cash and loads of cities to connect to. Two turns later, Mark bought into his 17th city and powered 16 of them, which was a couple more than the rest of us could manage.
Rich:
44
David: 43
Lesley: 41
Haydn: 31
Still one of the best games to come out of Essen this year, this one. The four that weren't playing Power Grid had a crack at this one, which proved very close indeed. Rich went down his usual route of building the farms quickly to give himself a fourth die (although that didn't stop him rolling 5, 6 and 7 with the four dice!), while David managed to get himself an Embassy by the second year, which immediately began to earn him points. Lesley complained bitterly about being blocked out of what she wanted on several occasions, which makes her 3-point loss look even more impressive.
After those two, we had time to split again and play two more (slightly shorter) four-player games:
Rich:
100
Gordon: 93
Lesley: 87
Sue: 66
I don't know much about this one. Rich grabbed his third consecutive victory of the evening by a few points from Gordon by seven points. But then, you could have worked that out for yourselves.
And the other four of us were off to Paris ....
Mark:
61
Nick: 55
David: 53
Haydn: 37
This was Haydn's first play of this excellent game, and it's one of those games that helps a little if you've played before. It was a pretty close-run thing through the first few rounds, but then Haydn started to get some rat trouble, while Mark was slowly building up cubes on the point-grabbing building, from which he took 17 points in the last couple of rounds to spring him ahead of the rest of us. David and I ended up fighting for second place.
And finally, a quick dance marathon to end the evening ....
Mark: 2
Stamina Left
David: Last to drop
Nick: 3rd=
Sue: 3rd=
Haydn: 5th=
Lesley: 5th=
Always a fun little dice roller, although the language was pretty appalling really, as we all kept missing the numbers we were going for! All apart from mark, of course, who actually managed a Gala to give himself a much-needed stamina boost half way through the contest. We were eliminated in pairs, to leave David and Mark in the dance-off; but it didn't take long for David's legs to go.
And that took us to 11.30pm, which was a little later than it should have been! Thanks to all those who came along.
