board games & card games for all ages
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Thursday 19th March 2009
Eleven of us in the shop tonight .....
Players:
Barrie, Darren, Dave F, David H, Mark P, Mel, Mike, Nick, Rachel, Simone, Sue
Games Played:
Eight of us were in early enough to try this starter ... inspired by opening with Take 5 the other night in the pub.
David
H: 0
Rachel: 0
Dave
F: 1
Mike: 9
Sue: 10
Simone: 18
Darren: 19
Nick:
37
This was a lot of fun, although a little more random than Take 5 and possibly even more random than 6 Takes, thanks to the numbers wrapping round. I got absolutely hammered, and never seemed to benefit from the "happy cows" as much as everyone else! We did have a rule slightly wrong about which row activated next, and it's possible that we saw more of the happy cows than we should have, backed up by the fact that we had two winners who managed not to end up with a single penalty point!
We now split into two groups of five .....
Five disappeared for a game of this ever-popular card game ....
Simone:
53
David
H: 42
Rachel: 34
Barrie: 29
Mike:
27
These are some pretty high scores. I'm not sure what rules were being used to end the game (4 empty piles?), but 27 in last position is pretty high! My guess is the gardens were in the deck ....
And the other group were off to the Canary Islands ....
Nick:
24
Dave
F: 23
Darren: 19
Mark P: 18
Mel:
15
Leo Colovini can be a little bit hit and miss with me. He has made the excellent Masons, and I always enjoy Carolus Magnus (but Sue doesn't), and yet there are a few fairly forgettable games as well. Luckily, this is one of the better ones. We all enjoyed the way it played (although we have found out since that Pirates will destroy any building (but I'm not sure that was relevant in our game). It looked like it was a definite battle between Darren and Dave, but then I got very lucky in the penultimate turn with the Settlers on the ship, and managed to create two towns on my final turn, boosting my score to 24 and nicking it by a single point.
The upstairs lot were finished first, and played this quickie ....
Mike:
4
David
H: 3
Simone: 3
Barrie: 2
Rachel:
1
A good win for Mike in this one, which was done in about 15 minutes I think!
We re-mixed the groups into two more sets of five .....
Dave
F: 38
Mel:
31
Barrie: 19
Mike: 15
Mark
P: -1
The general consensus of opinion here was that Dave managed to win this game without any skill whatsoever, relying completely on luck-of-the-draw risk taking. But having said that, isn't that kind of the point of the game ?
And the other five of us were off to Italy.
Darren:
(28 + 3) 31
Rachel:
(21 + 6) 27
David H: (22 + 6 - 5) 23
Simone: (21 + 6 - 5) 22
Nick:
(14 + 0) 14
Wow ... did I get hammered in this game. My largest of my initial cities had all but disappeared by the end, and the third city I started did get wiped out. Darren was reliant on one massive city in the centre of the board, and I think over 20 of his little guys were living in there by the end. As usual, the colours seems to come out all weird, and the layout was a bit wonky, but I'm beginning to think that maybe it's always like that!
While that was going on, the last remaining pair went battling. For a hill.
Game 1
Dave
F: Win
Barrie: Lose
Game 2
Barrie:
Win
Dave F: Lose
And that was that for another Thursday. Went on a bit too long this week, if you ask me. I think it was about 12.30 when we were done, and some people were getting a little tired. Thanks all for coming.
