Friday 22 April 2016

Hundred Club

Friday night, and Andrew arrived at my (Sam's) house for a spot of non-leaderboard gaming. The boys were keen to play and Stanley suggested Tokaido. Having just purchased the Crossroads expansion I was curious to try it out, so I was amenable. Andrew and Joe also agreed.

Tokaido is one of the gentlest games GNN has seen - it's a sedate journey where wherever you go, something nice happens. The theme is cultural enrichment, and the mechanic is get stuff. The expansion didn't change that much either; instead of doing a thing on a given location, you had a choice of things to do. But what it did bring to the party was more end-game scoring, which I totally forgot to do for myself - I should have added 8 points to my score for my collected coins.

Not that it would have changed my miserable placing. Stanley took us to the cleaners, breaking the scoreboard by surging past 99 and picking up all the bonus points for chatterbox, gourmand, bather and the other one.

Stanley 103
Andrew 74
Joe 62
Sam 47 (or 55 to be exact)

It's a sweet little game. Stanley went to bed happy and Joe - who not so long ago would insist on watching games - also seemed pleased with his pretty-much solo performance.

I told Andrew to set up whatever he fancied playing while I read stories upstairs, and when I returned to my delight Macao was on the table. Not quite the Euro of Euros (there's dice and luck involved) but still very little screwage.



However, I always find Macao a delight, and tonight was no different, even though Andrew surged off into an early lead... and kept it throughout, racking up a more than respectable 100+ score and breaking a scoreboard for the second time in the evening!

Andrew 112
Sam 93

For the next game we tried two-player Diamonsters. As suspected, it was a much more canny affair than the Dirk-like six player version on Tuesday. Even Finn was intrigued.



We established a house rule of choosing whether to refresh your hand each round or keep what you had - I needed the former with a hand of three 4's and two 2's hampering my bidding options. Official rules are first to five wins, but we played first to three:

Sam 3
Andrew 1

Andrew's turn to select and he went for 7 Wonders. Maybe Duel has had it's very brief day already, as we both went for the original ghost-player option. And in the early running Dirk was looking pretty good, but Andrew scored big for his wonders and guilds, overcoming a scrappy military and blue-buildings score. Before we added up the sciences - the last addition in scoring - I was on a measly 18 points! But my whopping 36points for green buildings took me just far enough to claim a win...

Sam 54
Andrew 53
Dirk 25

We wrapped up with Gobblet Gobblers, the game of flex-noughts and crosses. It looks so simple but you really do have to give each move serious thought, as your noughts/crosses (Gobblers) can be both placed or moved to any adjacent spot... and additionally big Gobblers can jump on small ones. It's possible to do the latter and find you've forgotten your opponent's Gobbler was hidden underneath, gifting them an easy win... that happened once or twice.


We played several games and won a few each, before wrapping up for the weekend...

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for hosting, Sam. As for Macao, I have to say the dice have never been kinder to me. For the first two thirds of the game, I more or less got stuff I could use. I built Finance cards early on, and then the grey dice kept paying out! It was like Vegas, baby.

    In 7 Wonders, I tried to burn as many science cards as I could, but obviously not enough.

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  2. Oh, and I'd also like to try Tokaido as a two-player with its AI third player. I'm sure Dirk would love a new game for a change.

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  3. Yeah that's how Stan and I first played it. He thrashed me then too, actually.

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