Weekend Gaming: Business as Usual

After putting in extra hours at work on Saturday, I was ready for some games that night.  Louis was the first to show up, and we weren’t sure if anyone else was going to join us, so we started to setup Settlers of America.  Just as we were getting ready to start, though, Ryan, Kevin, Joe and Phil joined us.  Joe, Kevin and Ryan volunteered to watch.

Settlers combines the basic Catan gameplay of rolling for goods and trading with other players, and Railways of the World’s need to deliver goods from one place to another.  The interesting thing, is that the player’s available goods are limited by the number of settlements they control.  The game starts everyone off in the Eastern US, and we needed to travel West to create new settlements.  I started off between Phil and Gina and I was able to quickly ship goods to both of them before needing to expand much further.  Louis had delivered to most of the Southeast before expanding to the Montana region.  I followed Louis up there, and I was  able to expand onto some good numbers.  I was getting quite a few materials each round and I was able to easily deliver to Louis’ settlements.  At the end, Phil had started to resettle some available locations in the East, so I was able to make tracks to them and finish the game by delivering my last goods to them.

Overall, it’s a pretty neat game.  There’s a lot more game to it than the basic Catan without losing a lot of what makes Catan great.  My only worry is that the static board would get a bit dull after a while compared to the ever changing board in standard Catan.

We followed that up with Princes of Florence with Gina, Phil, Joe, Louis and I playing.  Nothing really of note happened in the game.  I was having a tough time getting a Lake due to Joe monopolizing them.  I also couldn’t get a Recruiting card when I needed on because of Phil.  The game ended with Phil pulling off the most Works and seizing the game by a few points.

It was getting late, so we decided to play a quick game of Zombie Dice.  Gina was able to get a big run after a couple rounds and got to 18 brains.  I was the next closest with 11 and no one was able to get anything going, so she won with ease.

Following that, Kevin, Louis, and Ryan called it a night, but Phil and Joe were interested in playing another game.  Since I don’t get to play it often enough, I broke out Revolution!  The game started off well with Joe taking up a strong position in the Fortress, while I took the Harbor.  Gina and Phil were sharing the Cathedral.  Phil was picking up a strong lead with the Printer, but it wouldn’t be enough.  The game came down to what I thought would be the last turn, as there was only one spot left in the Cathedral.  Sadly for me, Joe was able to force a tie for the Priest with Phil, and the Cathedral was left empty.  In doing this, Joe had left himself prepared with more Blackmail and Force than anyone.  He was easily able to take the Spy and Apothecary on the last turn.  He moved some of my cubes around causing me to lose the Market and Town Hall.  This was a 80+ point swing in his favor and gave him the game.  It was definitely one of the more exciting games we’ve played and good end to the evening.

Until next time, happy gaming!

Weekend Gaming: Games Galore!

Ryan, Louis and Kevin joined us for games on Friday.  Kevin was late, so he sat out the first game, Quarriors.

Gina and I had never played it, so it took us both a little time to figure out.  The game is kind of like Dominion or Nightfall, in that you are trying to build a “deck”, but instead of cards, there are dice.  Each die represents a spell, a monster or the currency of the game.  The monsters attack the other players and get points, and the currency is used to buy more dice.  Ryan started the game strongly, getting enough to buy some big monsters on his first two turns.  This put the rest of us in a position where we couldn’t defeat his monsters and he was scoring a bunch of points.  This put him quickly into the lead.  I tried to go on the offense, but my monsters then couldn’t stick around long enough to score points.  Louis a strong showing, but in the end, Ryan was able to squeak out the win.

The next game was Infinite City.  It had been quite a while since we had played, so again there was a bit of a learning curve.  I started the game out with a tile that let me draw a bunch of tiles.  I then lost those tiles to Ryan due to a “swap tiles” tile.  A few turns later, I used my own tile to swap tiles with Louis and got a huge pile of tiles in return.  This ended up being less that great, because I wasn’t able to draw any new tiles for the rest of the game.  In the end, I was barely able to squeak out 11 points.  Louis won with 17, while Gina and Kevin weren’t far behind.

We then broke out Ryan’s copy of Nightfall.  I had drafted a decent combo of a vampire that let me bounce cards back, and an action that would do direct damage to players.  I then bought a couple copies of another vampire that would double the ability of the first vampire.  The only problem with this, was that I wasn’t able to combo of any of Louis’ cards to my right.  This meant that I was forced to play most of my cards on my turn, and they were never alive by the time my turn came around.  Ryan had a strong combo of a big werewolf and an ability to do direct damage to all of a player’s monsters.  He ended up getting ganged up a bit because of that.  Louis ended up taking the least damage and won the game.

We finished the night with a game of Zombie Dice.  I started things off with a good run to 7 Brains.  Ryan got to 8.  Kevin was slowly building, one or two at a time.  Louis hit 7 and then stalled out for a few turns.  I eventually made it to 11, and Ryan hit 12.  I wasn’t willing to go out with 15 and went for it, busting out.  Louis and Kevin managed to catch up, while Gina was still trying to get past 1.  I managed to hit another good run, and got to 17 Brains.  I felt safe there, kept it.  Ryan made it 16, but then got shotgunned.  Kevin and Gina got blasted quickly.  Louis managed to get to 17, but decided to go for it rather than trying for a tie breaker.  He ended up getting blasted, giving me the win.

It was a nice night with a variety of games.  It was great to go back and play a couple games we hadn’t played in a while.

Until next time, happy gaming!

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.