Seven eager gamers were in attendance. After we admired the hand-crafted version of Settlers that Adam had made for Hannah's birthday, Anja and Steve arrived. The first game of the evening was Incan Gold: a new game of treasure collection, coupled with an ingeniously simple mechanic of risking your luck, or getting out early and saving what treasure you have. I really enjoyed it and with all seven of us playing there was a lot of scope for bluffing or blundering into one anothers' plans.
Steve 37
Anja 34
Hannah 26
Sam 22
Joe 22
Adam 20
Andrew 17
After this was another enjoyable game: Choose The Game! In this, everyone tries to be more polite than everyone else in insisting they don't mind what they play. Then, in the final round, people write down their top three choices, and the votes are added up, and the seven of us split into two groups.
I was in a group with Adam, Joe and Anja as we played Hansa Teutonica. I was very wary about the threat of Adam rolling us over again, but Joe was confident we knew what to do this time. The others (Sam, Hannah and Steve) played Tinners' Trail and then Tsuro.
Hansa Teutonica began with a rule refresher for Anja and then we were plunged into the game. At first I was sure that Joe was making the same mistake again by not wanting to displace Adam even though if he did, he'd get an extra go. But Joe was not the naive fool of last time and before long he was the first to get five actions, and he made this advantage tell. Interestingly, we proceeded up the scoresheet very slowly this time and the game ended when the supply of bonus markers was exhausted (and so were we). The length of the game surprised Adam, who thought the game would end soon and so never levelled up his actions to the maximum five.
Joe 72
Adam 55
Andrew 51
Anja 45
Meanwhile the scores for Tinners' Trail were
Hannah 127
Sam 98
Steve 88
While their game of Tsuro ended
1. Hannah
2= Steve
2= Sam
An exciting opening to the season, with Hannah already making an early sprint for first place.
| Points | ||||||
| Hannah | 1 | 1 | 3 | 5 | 5 | 15 |
| Steve | 2 | 3 | 1 | 5 | 5 | 16 |
| Sam | 2 | 2 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 18 |
| Joe | 1 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 20 |
| Anja | 4 | 2 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 21 |
| Adam | 2 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 22 |
| Andrew | 3 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 24 |
Once again I found that explaining games is not as easy as Joe makes it look, but after a bit of faffing about and grasping for basic words we had at it.
ReplyDeleteIt was an interesting first round with high prices on tin and a combative approach to bidding. But having effected my 'trick' of preparing a tasty mine with ports and miners, I then elected not to buy it, as I saw that Steve's bid would put him out of pocket - and also out of resources for round one; hence no investments; hence no cash in round two. Mwah ha ha ha!
However my inner evil cackling echoed hollowly when I realised that I now had the crappest mine in Cornwall. In fact my gameplan never really recovered from my stinginess, as I spread myself too thin and played as though the game was over 5 round and not four.
Meanwhile, down at the Lizard, Hannah had been calmly carrying up bucket after bucket of water and serially getting herself in first place for successive rounds, removing water again. Her collection of three neighbouring mines was all she needed to establish an insurmountable lead going into the final round. But she outscored us then anyway, as neither of us had enough cash to extract our resources.
Then she beat us at Tsuro too. When does Pilates start again...?
I was surprised at how different Hansa felt this time — as you say, Andrew, we crept up the points track at an incremental pace, took many more bonus tokens, and made much shrewder use of the action that allows you to move existing pieces about. I remember in the first game we played it seemed unlikely that one could max out more than one ability within a game - this time I managed three, and I think only Adam failed to get any points that way.
ReplyDeleteWe were all more circumspect in building offices - it certainly seems that it's sensible to concentrate on improving your abilities early on, and then start filling offices when you can do so more efficiently. Otherwise you're hastening the game end without necessarily having much to show for it.
I like the opportunistic gameplay - when Adam realised he couldn't use the bonus token to simply jump in to the city I was in, he was still able to do it by moving cubes in, it just took up a few more of his precious actions.
I knew Adam was on the ropes when he started gently massaging a guinea pig on his lap, in a vain attempt to intimidate us with a Bond villain-esque countenance.
What was Anja's name for Adam? The cheese? The cheddar something. It was to do with his choice of yellow, and it was good. Someone remind us.
The curd?
ReplyDeleteI think it was "the creeping cheese", although now that Sam has said that I think "the curdish rebel" has a nice ring to it.
ReplyDeleteThe creeping cheese, yes that was it. Curdish rebel works well too. Excellent. Well done everyone. You okay with these Adam?
ReplyDeleteI vote for the Creeping Cheese, as it's less evocative of civil war and death. Even though essentially that's what we suffer at Adam's hands on the board.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I want to tell you it's the Creeping Custard. But at least that's better than Creeping Cheese...
ReplyDeleteOh yes, Creeping Custard. Oddly closer to Curd than Cheese . . .
ReplyDelete