Weekend Gaming: Father’s Day

I hope all the dads out there had a great Father’s Day weekend.  I know I did.

Gina and I started things off on Friday with Eminent Domain, followed by Le Havre and Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers.  In Eminent Domain, I had a couple of advanced planets with Trade symbols on them.  I was pushing to produce resources with Advanced Production actions and then trade them away quickly.  While doing that, Gina was racking up planets with Survey and Colonization.  She had bought a couple Advanced Colonization cards and was using them to colonize at least one planet per turn.  At the end, her planets outpaced my trading and she picked up the win.

Gina – 41, Andy – 36

Le Havre was next, and wasn’t terribly interesting.  She was having a tough time feeding her workers, while I was able to get a wharf and some early boats.  Nothing real spectacular about the game.

Andy – 289, Gina – 174

In Carcassonne, we ended up dueling for a large hunting area early, but while I was able to get an early lead with two hunters, she was able to sneak one of her own in to split the points.  I wasn’t able to pick up another substantial area, spending more time on the rivers.  She was able to grab another area, plus some good forests as well.  The game ended up being quite high scoring, and she managed to edge me out for the win.

Gina – 188, Andy – 173

On Saturday, Louis, Joe, Jaime, and Kevin joined us and we started things off with a game of Shadows over Camelot.  I was playing as Sir Bedivere, Joe was King Arthur, and I forget who the others were.  I started the game with two pairs in my hand, so I went over to the Black Knight tournament quest, but wasn’t able to get my cards out fast enough to win.  Joe was making good progress with the Grail, and Kevin and Louis were helping with Excalibur.  Gina was trying to help, but was drawing terrible movement cards and couldn’t get anywhere.  After failing to defeat the Black Knight, I went over to help with Excalibur.

At this point, we received a black card that prevented us from using Merlin cards, and then shortly thereafter we got hit with a card that damaged everyone.  Kevin was only at one life and we couldn’t save him.  Joe had a stockpile of cards, and was trading them with Gina, but she wasn’t playing them all that well, so Louis accused her as soon as he could.  She was loyal, though.

I ended up getting killed by another black card that we couldn’t stop, and things were looking bad as the table was filling up with black swords.  The game ended after another failed quest and seven traitor swords.  It turned out that Joe had been the traitor all along, and we were just playing so terribly that all he had to do was sit back and watch us fail.

We followed that up with a crazy game of Puerto Rico.  I started with indigo and intended to ship that and then got into coffee for money.  Louis was the only person picking up quarries, and Kevin ended up getting a factory because I was sitting before him and would block him out o selling his coffee.  Kevin also picked up a harbor, and since he was making every kind of good, he could ship them for quite a few points.

All big buildings were bought, two quarries were still available.

The craziest thing about the game, though, was that everyone was making quite a bit of money.  There was four gold on the prospectors a few times, Kevin was getting rich from his factory and I was selling coffee.  Everyone except Louis (the one with the quarries) was able to buy a big building, while I bought two.  The third row of buildings was also completely empty by the end of the game.  All of this was done while there was still two quarries left in the supply.

In the end, Kevin had been able to ship for something like 40 points, and then picked up a bit more with his buildings.  Gina shipped a bunch two and ended up in second.  I was close, though, with 25 points from shipping and two big buildings.

Kevin – 66, Gina – 56, Andy – 55, Jaime – 53, Louis – 44

We finished up the night with Louis, Kevin, Joe and I playing Eminent Domain.  I borrowed Gina’s strategy from the night before and went straight for surveying and colonizing.  Joe was using military to conquer planets and then research new technologies.  He managed to get the technologies that let him trade fighters as resources and use research cards as any type of card, and made quite a few points trading those off.  Louis was producing and trading quite a bit, while Kevin was using military to settle a bunch of planets.  I had intended to produce and trade along with my colonization, but it never quite worked out.  I did end up with the most points at the end, which surprised me.  I had thought that Joe picked up more points from shipping, even though he only had a couple of planets.

Andy – 30, Joe – 26, Louis – 22, Kevin – 21

Finally, on Sunday, Joe came over and he, Gina and I played a game of Le Havre.  This one went much better for Gina, as she was able to get a bunch of cows to ship on my shipping lines.  She had the boats to feed her people and a few industrial buildings that I kept using and paying her money.  The bad thing for me, was that I had intended to do a lot of the same things as Gina, and she managed to get them just ahead of me.  Joe, though, had his own thing going.  He was gathering all kinds of resources and then using the Business Office to convert them to steel.  This allowed him to build three Steel Ships by the end of the game.  He also built two of the high point buildings, which contributed to over 50 points for him.  Those last two builds are what bumped him into the lead, followed by Gina and them me.

Joe – 230, Gina – 201, Andy 195

It was a wonderful weekend, filled with games.  And I’m looking forward to many more with some new games as well.

Until next time, happy gaming.

Le Havre

Joe won with a ton of buildings.  He gathered wood and clay all game and baked bread for food.  He ended up with 254 points.  I had 228 points by building ships and a late game shipment of cows that picked up 30 points.  Gina rounded out the pack with 105 points.  She had a couple ships and a few buildings.  It was only the third time playing for Gina and I, and I thought we did alright.  I definitely understood the game a bit better than previous attempts.

 

Weekend Gaming: Finally Football!

Saturday night started out with a short game of Zombie Dice while everyone was arriving.  Joe jumped out to a quick lead while everyone else was having trouble scoring anything.  Kevin eventually managed to catch up a bit and hit a good streak setting the game to finish with a score of 16 brains.  Joe managed to get within one, but then busted out.  Ryan had a good streak as well, but he was trying to come back from nothing and just couldn’t get enough.

7 Wonders then hit the table and I ended up playing as Giza (a Wonder I don’t normally play).  I focused heavily on Civilian points and my Wonder and it worked out alright.  I had very minimal resources, so I was buying a lot from my neighbors.  Louis had a much more balanced game and picked up a lot of points from military, to take the win by about 8 points.

Ryan had brought Le Havre over, so we broke that out.  Since it only supports 5 players, Ryan sat out to get a break and help with the rules.  It was Gina’s and my first time playing and there is a lot of detail to the game.  It was designed by the same person as Agricola, so the gameplay is similar.  There food resources that need to be paid each round, action selection is similar to Agricola, and there are a ton of little pieces to the game.  That’s about where the similarities stop.  In Le Havre, you are trying to gain money/points by creating the best harbor.  Each round is made up of 7 actions split among the players.  So in a 5 player game each player typically gets 1 action, but two players will a second.  This rotates over the course of 20 rounds for a 5 player game.  At the end of each round, there is a food cost that is needed to pay your workers, which increases over the course of the game.  The actions consist of taking resources, building buildings and using buildings.  Only one person can use a building at a time, and you can’t use the same building multiple times, so that is a big part of the strategy.  The other interesting thing is that you are not limited to your own buildings.  You can use other players buildings any time you want (provided they are unoccupied), but many of them have a cost that must be paid to the owner.  So a big part of the strategy is to get buildings that other players will want to use, so you can get paid.

It was definitely different and I was having a tough time taking it all in.  There’s just a lot of options.  I didn’t do terribly, but I started off the game taking on a ton of debt that haunted me all game.  I was able to finally get rid of it at the end, but it took up turns that could have been better used for other things.  Also, my building choices were a bit weak.  I was trying to get a lot of buildings to maximize the benefits of my Arts Center (the player gets cash for the number of other players in his buildings), but it didn’t really work out.  It was pretty obvious that Joe, Kevin and Louis had played before, since they knew exactly what they were doing as they all ended up with at least 15 more points than Gina or I.  Joe ended up winning the game by a couple of points.  I like the game, but I will definitely need to play a few more times before I can really make a call.

After that, Kevin, Louis and Ryan took off, so Gina, Joe and I played another game of 7 Wonders.  While we had played a number of 2 player games, we’d never tried it with only 3.  It was definitely a different experience from the 5-7 players we’re used to.  There’s a lot more planning involved in what cards to pass and more foresight into what you’ll see in later hands.  In our game, Gina ended up with a very strong military strategy and took a bunch in Guilds as well to take the game by 10 points.

Sunday was spent enjoying the first real weekend of football and it was a nice relaxing weekend overall.  The first in quite a while.  Until next time, happy gaming.