New Horizons

Like Adam playing Hansa Teutonica, the domain of GNN slowly creeps across town. Tonight we met at a new venue: Steve and Anja's house. There were six of us: the aforementioned hosts, myself, Sam, Adam and Hannah.

First we were given a tour of the house and of the garden, with its signature feature: a two-foot drop from the patio doors to the ground below. Nothing that a step or two won't solve, though.

At first there was the usual over-polite "No, what do you want to play?" discussion. In the end we decided on Sam, Anja and Hannah playing Stone Age, and Adam, Steve and I playing Batavia. It was my first attempt at this game, and Steve and Adam also needed a rules refresher.

In this game, each player trades commodities with different countries' territories in the Indian sub-continent by playing the most cards of a particular nation than any of your opponents. The countries are depicted by flags, and Britain is, confusingly, looks similar to a flag used by the British during our rule over America, but is (according to Wikipedia) the flag of the British East India Company. So that's okay.

Also, there are some pirates who turn up every now and again and take away some cards. They don't seem to do a huge amount of damage, but they do stop the table top from getting too crowded.

It's a nice game, with definite possibilities for deeper strategies once you're familiar with the rules. Our inexperience showed painfully at the end of the game when one commodity has not been traded at all, and eleven points went begging for anyone smart enough to buy just one of them.

However, Adam won by simply picking up the highest scoring commodities. Obvious, when you think about it.

Adam 54
Steve 38
Andrew 36

I'll leave it to one of the others to fill in the details about Stone Age, and why they were laughing so much. We watched the closing stages and I noted with approval that Hannah ended the game with no resources left over. I like a gamer who's frugal with their imaginary supplies. But Sam won it in the end with a wide range of multipliers.

Sam 256
Hannah 228
Anja 143

While Stone Age was finishing, Adam optimistically set up Tinners' Trail, so that anyone who wanted to could jump right in. But by the time that Stone Age was over, and Steve had made the popcorn, there wasn't really time for anything so deep. Instead we chose Skull and Roses. Or, in this case, Picture Card and Non-picture Cards, since we were playing with a ordinary pack of cards.

Oh, how we wished Joe was here as we explained the rules to Anja, Hannah and Steve. In the end, we managed to get all the rules in the right order, and we were ready to begin. (There must be some secret to explaining rules. Joe, you should write something about it.)

1. Steve
2= Andrew
2= Adam
3= Hannah
3= Anja
4. Sam

After this, Adam and Hannah went home, leaving the four of us to play one last game of Picture Card and Non-picture Cards. Most of which we played with a cat reclining with supreme indifference across the table. I took victory with a daring bid of four when there were only four cards on the table. End with style, that's my motto. (For tonight, anyway.)

1. Andrew
2. Steve
3. Sam
4. Anja

Barely any change on the leaderboard as we enter the last month of the season.

						Points
Steve	2	1	2	1	1	7
Andrew	1	2	3	2	2	10
Adam	2	1	3	3	2	11
Joe	1	1	3	3	4	12
Hannah	3	2	3	5	1	14
Anja	4	3	3	2	2	14
Sam	3	4	1	4	4	16
Quentin	1	3	5	5	5	19
Jonny	2	2	5	5	5	19
Paul	3	1	5	5	5	19
Sally	3	5	5	5	5	23