Saturday 15 June 2013

From Macao with love

Friday evening, and the GNN call-sign was projected up onto the rainclouds that hung low over Bristol. Adam and Hannah hosted, with Sam and I in attendance.

We perused H&A’s imposing games cupboard – the sort of games cupboard that King George III might have had – but decided on a game that Sam brought with him: Macao. Everyone had played it, although there were some rusty memories, and everyone liked it, so onto the table it went.

I’ll be honest, up against three players who’d all beaten me comprehensively in the past, my hopes weren’t high, but when Spin The Bottle chose me as the starting player, and I saw a strong card in the opening choices, I thought perhaps I had a chance.

The star of the evening: Adam's Lambourghini Countach of dice arenas.

The card was The Store, which allowed you to swap two cubes for a cube of your choice. With this, as long as I had more cubes than I needed, I was able to build buildings far quicker than my opponents, all of who ended up taking a –3 punishment token or two as their tableaux filled up with unbuilt buildings.

Then I managed to put together a little gold-making chain, which allowed me to buy prestige points. In fact, my win was assured on the last round when buying any prestige points suddenly became very expensive. Since I was the only one who could raise that kind of capital in the short term (apart from Adam, who had some cash in reserve) I was able to hold on to the lead I’d held almost from the start.

Adam’s gold reserves and chain of city quarters allowed him to steal second from Sam in the last round. Meanwhile, Hannah’s minus points pulled her back into fourth.

Andrew 72
Adam 64
Sam 63
Hannah 58

I was very proud of my win, which was so clear to my opponents that Sam started packing away the game as I was playing out my last moves. If he’d started stacking the chairs on the table, he wouldn’t have been more obvious.

Last scores being calculated: pieces already in the bag

And then we played Biblios. Sam felt he needed some pride restoration, and so he suggested his favourite light game to round off the evening. We agreed, and so we began. There was a flurry of dice-adjustment cards early on, causing grumblings of “who shuffled these cards?”, but otherwise, the game played out as normal.

I went for two colours and picked up good letters, and won both. Hannah put all her effort into winning one die, and did so. But Sam lost both of his potential dice on the letter tie-breaker, and so he ended the evening on a slightly jilted note, as one of his most reliable games seemed to have found new people to hang out with.

Andrew 7
Adam 6
Hannah 3
Sam 0

On the form table, my two wins don’t launch me up as I hoped they might, with that “6” still hanging round my neck. The big winner tonight is Jon, who rises up to fourth without lifting a finger.







Points
Steve1 2 1 1 3 9
Anja2 3 1 13 10
Joe 3 3 2 1 1 10
Jon2 1 2 3 513
Adam 2 2 1 5 3 13
Sam 4 3 2 1 3 13
Andrew1 1 3 6 4 15
Quentin2 23 5518
Hannah3 4 4 5 2 18
Will3 3 5 5 5 21

4 comments:

  1. I'm loving the dice arena Adam - did you make it?

    Shame to have missed this one, though I would have been vying for last place in both of those games, I feel.

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  2. Great to play Macao again. I do like it a lot and I must say watching Andrew on this particular occasion was a lesson in Macaoing. I did undo a potential second place by missing out on a Baroness - the card I took I didn't read properly - but I wasn't going to catch Andrew.

    As for Biblios, well. My facebook relationship status has changed.

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  3. I made it for Hannah for Christmas. We need to buy more dice games...

    You're only three away from the perfect five Andrew. What do you want to play next?

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  4. Even if I win my next two games, everyone will insist the last one should be No Thanks.

    ReplyDelete