board games & card games for all ages

Monday 22nd June 2009

Five of us in the pub this week, as a bunch of the regulars decided to go off on hols. Sheesh.

Players:

David F-F, Haydn, Nick, Suzanne, Tim

Games Played:

FITS

Four of us were in early(ish) and decided to give this fun little game a go while we were waiting for David ...

Nick:    (4 + 8 + 3 + 11)    26
Haydn:    (3 + 8 + 5 + 8)    24
Tim:    (-3 + 3 + 6 + 9)    15
Suzanne:    (-1 + 1 + 5 - 6)    -1

Suzanne did start the game saying that she was no good at spatial awareness stuff, and she wasn't wrong! Tim started to get the hand of it after a couple of rounds, but sadly for him Haydn and I were busy making it a two-horse race. Luckily for me, at the very end of the final round, the last two tiles came out in the wrong order for Haydn and he suffered a couple of penalty points, giving me a two-point victory! Woohoo!

We were now five, and - after a little pondering - decided on the same game as last week:

Steam

David:    35
Tim:    34
Nick:    27
Haydn:    26
Suzanne:    21

My word, this is much tighter with five than it was last week with four! We played the Rhein/Ruhr map (thankfully), but by the seventh turn we were really struggling to find places to build, mainly thanks to the mountain range in the corner that we all ignored. Tim got off to a flying start in this one and seemed to have things under control, but David started to edge back into it, mainly thanks to the odd delivery from other players (mainly me) that gave him a point here and there. To be fair, David and I were doing this a bit, as we'd overlapped a little on links, so I would be earning a point on his turn, and then generally repaying it on my turn! In the final turn, I made the best delivery I could for me, which unfortunately gave David the point he needed to sneak ahead of Tim. And Tim would have won the tie-breaker too! I felt a little bad deciding on the winner, but eventually I had made the best move for me, otherwise Haydn would have been in front of me at the end, so that made me feel a little better. Suzanne was the only one of us who hadn't played any sort of train game before, and started well with her own little rail network at the bottom of the board, but then bogged down a little mid-game when her cubes had run out.

And  - having said that last week's three games was a new record low - that was all we had time for! So ... Two games is the new record. I can't see it ever dropping to one, but you never know!