Wednesday 26 September 2012

Five's Companies. Four: No Thanks.

With the Games Weekend still visible in the rear-view mirror, it was inevitable that someone would find Tuesday night had come around too soon. But it was a shock to find it was Andrew, GNN stalwart and  linchpin. Everyone has their limits I suppose.

Instead Steve, Anja and myself joined Adam and Hannah in a wind-blown Easton for the final Tuesday of the season, if not the final games night (Joe's is open to takers this evening).

After some indecision over whether the migraine-recoveree Hannah would join us, that involved Ys being emptied onto the table, we eventually became a quintet and Batavia was chosen. New to me, and a distant relative to everyone else (Steve had memories of Quentin wiping the floor with everyone on it's GNN debut) the game is about sailing companies - owned by particular countries - represented by old and in some cases confusingly misrepresentative flags - establishing trade routes across the Middle East and the Orient. Players don't represent the companies (or the countries) but a kind of abstract capitalist, encouraging the companies to various destinations in order to establish a sharehold in a particular product - tea, cotton, ginger, bath mats etc.

Mmmm... smells like pirates

Throw into the mix some perversely moral pirates, who always attack the most powerful fleet on the sea, and you have a fairly confusing game. All of us at one point or another were confounded by the rules, though perhaps the least confounded was Adam, who saw the destructive potential in the pirates early on and sent them after Anja, then going on to manage his resources to engineer a strong win. I'm still not sure how he did it - there's a balance to strike between your cash, your ship cards (that move the ships) and making sure you have the strongest hand in a particular company that all seemed at least partly luck-dependent to me. Both Anja and Hannah spent valuable turns forced to pick up ship cards (and therefore were unable to do anything on the board) and my early lead was overhauled by Adam and, briefly, Steve, as my card management floundered at the bidding stage.

Oh yeah, there's bidding too. All in all a slightly muddled game to my eyes. But clearly there are strategies to be found, as the winning player will testify.

Adam 54
Sam 41
Steve 37
Anja 27
Hannah 22

As we'd started a little late it was nearing half past ten, so as Hannah retired to bed the rest of us rounded off the evening with a game of No Thanks, which newbie Steve won as my high-card strategy blew up in my face.

Steve 29
Adam 31
Anja 45
Sam 49

A text from Andrew on the way home told me if Adam had won No Thanks he would have gained the Perfect 5 (ie a five-game winning streak) on the form table! So that holy grail remains out there, tangible and yet beyond reach, like the deciding pepper share in Batavia that neither myself or Steve could grab for ourselves.*

Despite that Adam is the man to beat on the form table. So glad I got my boasting about SeptCon in at the start of the evening, when it still meant something...


*actually nothing like that. I haven't had much sleep.








Points
Adam2 1 1 1 1 6
Joe 2 2 1 2 3 10
Sam4 2 2 2 1 11
Steve1 3 3 3 2 12
Andrew 3 4 2 1 3 13
Anja 3 4 3 3 2 15
Hannah 5 43 4 1 17
Dan 15 5 5 521
Quentin 43 5 5 522

5 comments:

  1. Yet another No Thanks pun. Sorry.

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  2. Joe's only hope of topping the form table is if I agree to play Castle of Burgundy five times in an evening.

    I like Batavia. By the end of the game, I thought I knew what a winning strategy would be. Of course, it's been so long since I played that I can't remember what it was.

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  3. Well we could play Rattlesnake ten times - then I'd only need to win half the games . . .

    Lovely write-up Sam!

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  4. I think my strategy was to get a very cheap 6 cards at the start and then carefully follow one company at a time for the rest of the game. A six card haul is so valuable that I think I should have bid straight to 15 to be sure I got it.

    It was also vital to my shady masterplan to ruin anja's game.

    Great write up Sam, and damn you Steve for ruining my perfect 5!

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  5. Yes, well done Steve. While Adam is odds-on to capture the magic 5, it's nice to know we're still in with a shout.

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