Weekend Gaming: Father’s Day!

The gaming started Saturday night with Joe, Phil, Kevin joining us.  Phil brought along his copy of Agricola at my request.  I hadn’t played the game in quite a while, and this would be only my second time playing.  In Agicola you take the role of a farmer trying to build the best farm over the course of 14 turns.  Each turn you have a number of actions equal to the number of people in your family.  You can grow you family, but you need to build a bigger house first, plus every few turns there will be a harvest, and at that point you need to ensure that you have enough food to feed your family.  Food and points are acquired through growing wheat and vegetables for cooking, or by raising various animals.  There are a ton of things you can do each turn, along with bonuses supplied by a random hand of cards dealt at the beginning of the game.

In my game, I was dealt a hand with a few cards that gave me bonuses for planting and harvesting wheat and vegetables.  I didn’t own any livestock until the very end of the game.  I was able to easily produce enough food that way to feed my family, but the work was a bit time consuming and I wasn’t able to put enough effort into upgrading my house or really expanding my family.  I had a strong game from that, but without the big bonus from my house, I wasn’t able to get enough points for the win.  Kevin ended up focusing heavily on building his house and family and then grabbed a bunch of sheep late in the game which propelled him into the lead.  It really is an interesting game with a lot of strategic depth.  There is a nice variety to the actions so that it doesn’t get too stale.

Louis had joined us part way through Agricola, so we launched into a six player game of Acquire.  I was able to get into a large company early this time, but it grew very quickly, and I was tapped out of cash fairly early on.  Luckily, I was able to sneak in a couple of smaller mergers with Phil’s help that provided me some liquidity.  It was not enough, though, as at the end of the game there were three large companies, and I only held an interest in one of them.  I placed a close third, but Phil and Kevin were neck-and-neck for first place with Kevin eeking out the win by $400.

We finished up the night as usual with a couple games of Dominion.  In the first set, I was able to quickly setup my deck with a Chapel and a Vault.  This allowed me to pare down my deck to the bare essentials.  i then added in some Mining Villages for extra actions, and an Expand.  These allowed me to quickly more my money up to Platinum and start buying Colonies.  I was buying them up almost every turn until they ran out.  This is when I made the mistake of getting complacent.  I stared buying action cards to try and end the game quickly, rather than buy more points.  I was worried that my wife, who had started buying a lot of Provinces, would catch me.  Little did I realize that Joe had nearly as many Colonies as I did, along with a few provinces.  At the end of the game, I had an even 60 points, while he had 68.

The second set was rather annoying.  My wife and Kevin were able to get Torturers early, and were annoying the rest of us.  In retaliation, Joe and I bought into them late with some extra buys allowing us to grab a bunch at once.  At this point both of us had decent engines running with Cities and Grand Markets allowing extra actions and draws.  We were regularly playing out our entire decks forcing everyone at the to either take Curses or Discard their entire hand.  I finally decided to put the game out of its misery by emptying one of the action piles rather than buy more points.  Sadly, it tended to make things worse, because most of the people at the table had been taking Curses rather than discard because they expected to get another turn.  It was an interesting set, but with no way to really counteract the Curses or discard mechanic it just became annoying when they happened repeatedly.

On Sunday, Phil’s daughter was getting baptized so we spent part of the day over at their place.  It was a nice way to celebrate Father’s Day and we were able to get in a game of Railways of the Western US as well.  Joe was able to get a bunch of the early bonuses and also monopolize the West Coast.  I could have countered that, but I was too focused on trying to complete my Baron (San Fransisco to Demming) an the San Fran to Promontory route.  Phil was controlling the lower Midwest with a couple long routes and some well placed hotels, while my wife had the Eastern edge of the Rockies in her control.  Jaime was building in the Northwestern Rockies getting points in Salt Lake City and Butte.  I was able to complete the Golden Spike bonus for building from Omaha to San Fransisco, but it was only after taking on way too much debt and basically conceding the game to Joe.  he had been making long shipments all along the west coast, and won by a sizable margin.

Overall it was a very nice, relaxing weekend.  Happy Gaming!