Anyway with five us present pre-Andrew, we indulged in a spot of tomb-raiding with the in-vogue Incan Gold. This is very much a game of luck, with some very minimal strategising based on the liklihood of what card is coming next - something you more often than not get wrong anyway. I was resolved to change my habit of dashing out first, hoping the others would perish, and after a hesitant first round I pushed my luck so much in the second one - successfully - that I could play a fairly laid-back final three rounds. The highlight though was Steve's evil cackling anytime somebody crashed and burned - usually Joe. A new side to the apparently sanguine charity worker...
Sam 51
Steve 37
Quentin 27
Adam 18
Joe 7
Andrew arrived toward the end of the game and now six-handed, we debated how to proceed. Joe got as far as laying Maria out on the table, but only Adam really bit (Andrew and Quentin were tempted, but put off by the relatively late hour) so it was folded away again. Following some 'after you' style negotiation - we really need someone bossy at these moments - we finally split into two groups of three. Steve, Adam and Quentin played Ascending Empires and Joe, Andrew and myself began building our Alhambra's.
My luck continued at the start of the game and lasted throughout - it's a less random game than Incan Gold, but you are often at the mercy of the non-negotiable correlation between cards and tiles, and things just seem to offer themselves up to me: I swiftly created a long wall and found myself in the lead on Towers. When the first scoring round arrived Joe had only placed two tiles, and his position didn't look that healthy. But he pulled it back to nab second from Andrew, courtesy of his maze of Arcades and Chambers.
Sam 157
Joe 103
Andrew 94
Over in deep space the others were in deep thought, and the description of Ascending Empires as 'a bit of fun' looked to have taken on a majestically dark hue, as Quentin played a game of combat and Adam fought to keep him in check. Steve meanwhile was lurking around the edges, picking up scraps like a good adaptive lifeform should. But they were a long way from finished, so we broke out Mammut, inspired by Chris' recent game in the Bracknell branch.
I like Mammut, but it can melt your brain. It's a game of juggling possibilities, where one advantage negates another, and you can never get everything you really need. But the mechanic of choosing your hand through negotiation is really nice, and no matter how far you are behind if someone has a bad round and you have a good one, the game can be turned on it's head. That said, Joe's early lead disintegrated in the face of his reluctance to ever get a decent fire going. Allied to always being last on the mammoth track, it meant he fell too far behind to stand a chance of catching us on the final round, and was faced with the choice of either maximising his own points or shunting Andrew in front of me. Honourably, he chose the former, giving me a somewhat fortuitous 1-1-1 spread for the night.
Sam 96
Andrew 83
Joe 62
Andrew and Joe left and I turned my attention back to Ascending Empires. I remarked how it looked an even spread of planet occupation across the board, but Adam noted fatalistically that that was about to change. And all it took was the time for me to wash up some beer bottles for the whole political make-up of the galaxy to swing to McPhee green, as Quentin went on the rampage, destroying Adam's civilizations with merciless abandon. Steve's elusive approach got him a very healthy second:
Quentin 40
Steve 35
Adam 20
A fine evening, thank you gentlemen.
| Points | ||||||
| Sam | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 7 |
| Steve | 2 | 2 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 12 |
| Adam | 3 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 12 |
| Hannah | 1 | 1 | 3 | 5 | 5 | 15 |
| Andrew | 2 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 16 |
| Joe | 3 | 2 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 17 |
| Anja | 5 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 17 |
| Quentin | 1 | 3 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 19 |
| Jonny | 2 | 2 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 19 |
A stonking night for Sam — a frustrating one for me, but fun nonetheless.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to get Maria out at every games night from now on, I don't care if it ever gets played. At least it gets looked at.
The trick with Alhambra is in furnishing yourself with flexible cards, combinations of numbers that will allow you the greatest chance of being able to pay the correct money. Sam was a total hoover, managing to take tiles on practically every turn from the very start, whereas my huge hand of cards seemed to offer the fewest possible iterations. Andrew fell somewhere between the two of us, but I was grateful to place second in the end — if Andrew hadn't split first place for arcades with Sam it might have been a different story.
Mammut was a curiously muted affair — it was only in the fifth and final round that anyone took anyone else's tiles, barring Andrew's forced amnesty card.
It struck me (afterwards) that you need to be vigilant from round one — in past games my collection of cute furry animals has allowed me to catch up or even leap ahead in the final scoring, but all three of us managed to get the full bonus for them in the end, by which time my fur track placing had doomed me.
I couldn't say for sure, but I think I would have been better off taking your tiles again in that last round Sam — in the hopes that you'd want them back, thereby gaining me an extra two tiles (not that it would have made a difference to the final placings by any stretch).
This I cut/you choose is the heart of the game, and as player three, who only gets one round as first player against the other players two, maybe you have to play more aggressively form the word go.
Or maybe I was too busy doing caveman impersonations.
I forgot the caveman impersonations. They were very good, although maybe we should say they were very entertaining, as we can't be totally sure how accurate they were.
ReplyDeleteYou may be right about the final round of Mammut. I should have taken just 2 axes, grabbing all 3 gave the game away as to what my hidden card was.
Alhambra: previously I've collected lower denominations on the cards, but last night I went for the big ones and it seemed to pay off. I guess the fact you and Andrew often picked up low cards helped in that when the bigger value tiles came out I could swoop on them, and when they didn't I was happy to pay over the odds, as I did 3 or 4 times I think. But I don't know if that tactic would work every time.
Disappointed I didn't get second in Alhambra. Just an extra tile would've sealed it for me. But well done to Sam for a new high score.
ReplyDeleteWhen I looked across at Ascending Empires after only a couple of minutes and saw that Adam already had a third movement point, I thought he was going to roll over his opponents like he does as Hansa Teutonica. But I needn't have worried: With Quentin's glistening brown tech and Steve researching pink, he never stood a chance. Plus, of course, Spurs won at the weekend, which is why Adam's form has tailed off.
I can't quite work out what I did wrong in Ascending Empires. Maybe I angered Quentin by destroying one of his research bases (in a manoeuvre I'm going to call a "Morrison") right at the start. That was probably the only point where we stood a chance because pretty soon afterwards he was roaming the inky depths in his battleship blowing the hell out of all our stuff...
ReplyDeleteI have a feeling I should pay more attention to what everyone else is doing in AE, but I'm happier simming along - working out the best move as each turn comes up rather than with a big plan laid out - so it came as a bit of a surprise when Quentin started pounding us...
I love research! You must have me confused with someone else.
ReplyDeleteYou don't remember your all-the-way-across-the-galaxy flick that destroyed a research station of mine that I thought was safe? It was an amazing shot...
ReplyDelete