board games & card games for all ages
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Monday 25th January 2010
There were a rather-difficult-to-split-up seven of us in the pub this week .....
Players:
Cathy, Darren, David F-F, Nick, Rich, Sue, Suzanne
Games Played:
The first four of us decided on this quickie .....
Cathy:
(23 - 14) 9
Nick:
(28 - 8) 20
Sue: (35 - 0) 35
Darren:
(70 - 22) 48
If I remember rightly, this was my game all the way. And then, Cathy got an incredibly lucky draw with the last card of the stack, linking up her two runs of card into one large run ending in 19 (and a single 4 card). Of course, me getting down to 28 myself was pure skill. Cathy also didn't push her luck too far in letting the cards she wanted go round the table, which was interesting, as I've always thought that's the best way to play this thing ....
And now there were six of us, but we were still waiting for others, so another quickie ....
Sue: 366
Rich:
170
Nick: 162
Suzanne: 94
Cathy: 90
Darren:
66
I put this game in the bag as I was getting a lot of abuse about winning it the last time and then never packing it again. Rich never really passed me anything workable (obviously), whereas I must have kept setting Sue up for big scores, as she was sat on my left. There's not a whole lot you can say about this one really. We rolled a load of dice, Sue got lucky. There.
We now split into two slightly uneven groups ......
Rich:
(15 + 5 + 4) 24
Darren:
(9 + 10 + 0) 19
Cathy: (7 + 6 + 4) 17
Nick:
(10 + 5 + 0) 15
The four of us fancied trying this new tile-based game. The concept is pretty simple: Add a tile to the city, place a marker on it, and then do what it says on the tile. We each have 15 markers, and the game ends when someone runs out. You score points for the amount of markers in an adjacent group (Rich got all of his in one large group), plus some tiles are worth points just being on them, and then there are some special "silver" tiles that the person with the most on gets a bonus for. This was an interesting little game - Very quick to play once we realised how it worked. My starting hand of five tiles didn't look too exciting, so I played a tile early on to get me another five, which still didn't help a lot! As it turned out, I seemed to get a weak hand, as the people playing the "steal a tile and play it" cards had started avoiding my hand, despite the extra choice! In the end, Rich did a pretty good job of messing up the early leader (Cathy) and getting all his tokens together. That's another thing about this game: Don't shoot off into an early lead - You'll get hammered! We all enjoyed it, and it nearly got a second outing later in the evening.
Sue:
59
David:
52.5
Suzanne:
41
Another outing for this popular game. As you have probably guessed by now, I know absolutely nothing about this one. Everyone had played before, so it was quite a quick game compared to some we've seen. Enjoyed by all three and still proving very popular ....
The group of four managed to squeeze another quickie in ....
(Provinces & People + SPQR Tiles + Fortune Tiles + Reroll Tokens)
Darren:
(23 + 6 + 14 + 2) 45
Nick:
(20 + 12 + 6 + 2) 40
Cathy: (13 + 16 + 4 + 1) 34
Rich:
(27 + 0 + 6 + 1) 34
This is a fun dice game, and one that grows on me every time we play. Cathy was the only player to go first twice, and both times placed a massive run of six dice on the middle building (too lazy to go look that up), speeding the game up considerably! Rich went mad for Provinces, which are at least worth something even if they're empty, and I did the opposite and went for loads of people, who sadly are worth nothing if they have no home! Darren went for the Fortune Tiles from the Temple (I think) almost every turn, and it was those that won him the game in the end. Cathy beats Rich thanks to having more homeless people.
We dropped down to six players ....
Sue:
51
David:
45
Rich: 41
Nick: 34
Suzanne: 32
Darren:
28
Another push-you-luck game! It seems that we ended up playing a lot of these tonight. A game that we hadn't played for a long time, and a lot of fun it was too. Full of everyone complaining that they had a weird hand. Whereas I actually did have a weird hand, full of only two colours even when I had ten cards! I was not a very successful pilot.
And finally ....
Nick:
69
David:
60
Sue: 56
Darren:
37
This version of the excellent Ra is really growing on me. I had a lot of buildings, and even managed to cope with a few of the plague tiles. On the final turn, I got my pyramid up to the fourth level, and it had four burial chambers of the same colour, which helped me towards the win. Apart from that, I haven't the faintest idea what happened in this one from other people's points of view, which - I suppose - is the same for the last game every Monday. That's beer for you.
And that was all we managed this week. Thanks for coming out, and see you all next week.
