board games & card games for all ages
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Monday 28th July 2008
A quieter week this week with just five of us in the pub ....
Players:
David
F-F, Jonathan, Nick, Rich, Sue
Games Played:
The first four of us decided to get this out and see if anyone else came along ....
Jonathan:
33
Sue:
27
Nick: 26
David: 25
We only had time for one round before Rich turned up, and - yet again - the odds were defied as we only saw one 7 and not a single 9 all game. If a 9 had come up on the final roll, I'd have had 40 more points!
This was the shortest 5-player game we could find, just in case someone else was coming along ....
(Movies + Oscars + Cash)
Sue:
(37 + 20 + 14) 71
Rich:
(42 + 25 + 0) 67
Jonathan: (29 + 10 + 21) 60
David: (33 + 10 + 5) 48
Nick:
(33 + 0 + 8) 41
This was a pretty good win for Sue in a fairly competitive game. I bought a couple of lots early on, going for a cheap movie, but then it left me a little cashless a little early (and anyway, David made a movie which was way worse than mine ... stealing the "crap film" Oscar from under my nose! Rich actually gained the most points from Oscars, thanks to leading the best film category for at least two of the seasons. The new movies ran out very early, and then it was just a race to finish the ones we had. In the final party, the two of us with first choices were the only ones who couldn't complete movies, so we just stopped anyone else doing the same!
I chose this game full of disasters ....
Nick:
98
Jonathan:
89
David: 88
Sue: 83
Rich: 58
This was a fun game which, unusually, I actually managed to get right! The game was perhaps quite generous to us in that the good events (fireworks) came out in months 3 and 4, which effectively gave us all four rounds before anything bad happened. By this time, I had built three pretty large palaces and was happy to kill my fireworks expert when the drought hit. David bought a large Privilege in the first round which saw him out in front (and threatening to stay there) for the whole game, but he did suffer a bit from not having any room for new employees as the game went on. Sue was the only one who failed to have enough doctors, which cost her a couple of people near the end of the game. Rich suffered terribly from being at the back of the people track for the first half of the game, leaving him with some pretty awful choices of action, and never really recovered from that. Jonathan was ticking along nicely with me a few spaces behind David, and when it came to endgame scoring, my 10 people and four palaces (and the couple of points gained from selling fireworks) pushed me out in front.
Jonathan had to leave us, which meant that Rich could be badgered into choosing this excellent game to end with ....
(Points + Resources + Symbols + Tools + Builders + Shamen + Farmers)
Nick:
(108 + 0 + 25 + 0 + 35 + 0 + 5) 173
Sue: (82 + 4 + 4 + 72 + 0 + 0 +
0) 162
Rich:
(61 + 2 + 16 + 0 + 6 + 35 + 25) 145
David: (78 + 2 + 16 + 0 + 5 +
16 + 0) 117
This is probably the largest spread of scores we've seen for this game! As usual, it was a game full of moans and groans as people each took the action the next player wanted. Each time we play this game, the cards prove more and more popular (quite often in this game, all four of them went in a round). I wasn't planning on a building strategy, but in an early round I took the "triple builder" card to stop anyone else getting it, and then a few rounds later I did the same with a "double builder" card that I really took for the immediate benefit, and it suddenly occurred to me that I should be building a load of cheap huts just to get the bonus points (5 of my 7 huts were the "?" ones). Sue meanwhile was collecting tools and tool makers, while Rich was going for farmers (but couldn't get enough fields .... hardly any were rolled on the distribution cards) and David was generally spreading himself a little too thin! Always a fun game, this one.
And that was all we had time for .... Thanks to those who came along.
