Let it snow, let it snow, let it Snowdonia

Due to the vagaries of the Gregorian calendar, this year the final day of the season came round fully two weeks before the end of the month. With Christmas and New Year falling on a Tuesday, family and friends and festivities have curtailed the gaming for 2012. At least until our non-leaderboard Christmas special on the 28th.

We were expecting six on the final evening, but Adam texted saying he was ill, and as me, Sam and Joe were playing Biblios as a warm up we received a late cancellation from Steve and Anja. A real shame, especially as it meant we couldn't dislodge Steve from his perch atop the form table without some kind of miracle occurring.

Meanwhile, Biblios remains as intractable as ever, with Sam convinced throughout the game that he'd played it all wrong. Of course, he won.

1. Sam 7
2. Andrew 5 + brown cards
3. Joe 5

Then, since we were three, we decided to play a new game. Snowdonia is the game that Joe received in return for a trade with City of Horror. If nothing else, we were looking at a net gain, right?

Well, yes. This is a game very much in the style of Tinners' Trail or Village: worker placement to collect goods/do deeds/win end-game bonuses and finally build a railway all the way up to the peak of Mount Snowdon.

Near the start of the game. Most meeples still in the pub.

It was our first game and I wonder how much we understood. I was frustrated by Joe consistently playing a move that gave Sam a chance to grab starting player. Meanwhile, Sam hoarded goods for much of the start of the game, and I picked up bonuses and tried to make sure I completed them.

In the end, my doubts over Joe's strategy were unfounded as he won. Not by a little, but by a comfortable margin thanks to his 60+ bonuses, which neither Sam nor I saw coming at all. And for all our sound and fury, we rattled into the sidings at the top of Snowdon as empty vessels, joint second.

1. Joe 113
2= Sam 95
2= Andrew 95

Cubes on cards... Joe's favourite thing in the world

It was still relatively early, so we decided to break out the whiskey and end on Las Vegas, the gambley dice game that isn't Lords Of Vegas. In this, you roll a number of dice and then chose a value to place into a casino, hoping that at the end, you have the most dice in that casino so you can claim the money that was dealt out to it at the start at the game.

It's a cruel game, with ties cancelling each other out, and every player is given two dice which will act against them, so be careful which value you choose. I never got started, and soon found that I was being picked on by the two wheeler-dealers who mostly split the winnings amongst themselves.

1. Sam $540,000
2. Joe $470,000
3. Andrew $250,000

And so it ends! No more games for 2012, and we now receive the final judgement on our efforts to appease the gods of board games. On the form table, Steve stays in first place with Sam just falling short in second. Who knows, if his request for one last game this evening had been granted, he may have won.

						Points
Steve	2	1	1	1	2	7
Sam	1	2	1	2	2	8
Anja	1	2	3	3	1	10
Joe	2	1	3	3	1	10
Andrew	3	2	2	1	3	11
Adam	3	4	1	2	3	13
Hannah	1	1	5	5	5	17
Paul	1	3	5	5	5	19
Jon	3	5	5	5	5	23
Chris	6	2	5	5	5	23

As for the Q system, a late flurry of games means that Sam pushes himself into first place, ahead of Adam. And then me and Joe also barge past Adam too, just for good measure. Paul win on points ratio.

On the Olympic style leaderboard, the story is very similar. Adam, who lead for much of the season, is overhauled by his closest rivals packing in as many games as possible at the last minute. Sam nabs top spot here.

But before Adam loses all hope, allow me to introduce next season's scoring system. I'm afraid we'll be saying goodbye to the Q-system in favour of something that allows for the three main aspects of a win: number of players, length of time and size of win. As such, this new system uses Adam's method of transforming any score to a scale between zero (loser) and one (winner), and then multiplying that by the number of players, and then multiplying again by length of time in hours (according to boardgamegeek). This is, I think, the most accurate reflection of a gamer's worth and I say that despite coming last in points ratio. And congratulations to Adam and Hannah for winning this new scoring system.

And thanks to this new system, we're able to recognise the best performance of the season, which was Adam's victory over four of us in Game of Thrones, where none of us managed even half of his score. A remarkable acheivement that ranks alongside any overhead kick from the edge of the box into the corner of the net in the last minute of a World Cup game.

A bit.

Anyway, congrats to all our winners (namely Sam, Adam, Hannah and Paul, but we're all winners if we play board games, right?) and I hope to see you on the 28th!