board games & card games for all ages
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Thursday 3rd January 2008
The first games night of the new year, and a nice even ten players came along for a few games ...
Players:
Darren, Dave C, Dave F, Gordon, Mark P, Mel, Nick, Rachel, Steve, Sue
Games Played:
The first six jumped straight in to this one I picked up in the sale ...
Dave
F: $48,000,000
Darren:
$34,000,000
Nick: $29,000,000
Rachel: $27,000,000
Steve:
$18,000,000
Gordon:
$3,000,000
This was a load of fun, and fairly noisy and chaotic at the same time. I think you need to bully your way in to as many deals as possible, hoping that no one will notice that you are accumulating a bunch of cash. I made the mistake of striking the first deal, and then spent a long time with hardly any cards, as Dave (on my left) kept hijacking the deals!
Meanwhile, four more had arrived and started this excellent card-based game ....
Sue:
74
Dave
C: 69
Mark: 64
Mel:
58
I caught the end of this game, and it was a pretty tight affair. Dave had managed to grab himself quite a big lead during the game, but Sue was obviously ahead in Aristocrats, which was going to close things up a lot at the end. As it came to the very final phase, Mark and Mel were the only players who could have benefitted from a pink upgrade card, but Sue bought it, just to stop Mark having it. When the bonus points were added, Sue scored 36 compared to everyone else scoring 15, and grabbed a 5-point win.
We split the ten into two groups, and this was the choice of the five upstairs ....
Steve:
45
Dave
F: 36
Rachel: 34
Darren: 32
Gordon: 28
I don't know a whole lot about this one, although it looks as though Steve had it nicely under control. Gordon was relying on grabbing some stone in the final round, and managed to roll a total of 4 with his three dice! Which I suppose is a good example of why everyone should build the Church!
Meanwhile, the downstairs group spent the rest of the evening playing this excellent game ...
(Citizens + Bonuses - Starvation Penalty)
Sue:
(33 + 6 - 5) 34
Mark: (30 + 3 - 0) 33
Nick: (26 + 6 - 0) 32
Dave C: (19 + 3 - 0) 22
Mel: (18 + 3 - 5)
16
I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed this game. Sue suffered heavily in the first round, and then proceeded to make an excellent comeback, despite leaking people pretty regularly from one of her cities. Dave leaked a lot of people, die to getting surrounded by more neighbours than you'd really want in a couple of his cities. In the first couple of rounds, the voice of the people contained three face-down cards of the same colour, which threw all of our planning out a little! About half way through the game, I was looking at starting my last city in a half-decent spot on the board, decided to wait a little, and Mark took the spot and created a really nice supply of food, which annoyed me no end! By the end of the game, Sue had a massive influx of people from everyone else, and - despite being one food short - that was enough to give her an excellent win.
After Kingsburg, Gordon had to leave us and the other four players decided to finish the night with this fun new game ....
Dave
F: 83
Rachel:
81
Steve: 79
Darren:
67
This looks like it was a pretty close fight (between three of them, anyway). Apart from that, I know absolutely nothing about the game ... I was too busy starving my little Italians.
And that, surprisingly, was all we had time for this week. Thanks for coming along and we'll see you all next week, no doubt.
