Ed held another game day. This time without the grilled Brautwurst… boo! I made a bread pudding. Actually, more like an egg custard. It was quite rich. The recipe called for Croissants instead of bread, 3 cups of heavy cream, 3 1/2 cups of whole milk, 9 large eggs, and 9 large egg yolks. I was able to successfully guilt some people in taking some home since I told them that I would just throw most of it away.

It was good. A little runny perhaps. Next time double the amount of croissants and perhaps add some corn starch to thicken it up a bit.

Bluff

The main point of this game day for me was the playing of Roads and Boats. But since one of our players was running late, we started a game of Bluff as a filler. I spent the whole game getting smacked down by the dice and their non-averageness. Everytime I didn’t believe a statement, the dice proved otherwise and I quickly was out of the game.

Roads and Boats

So we finally started Roads and Boats. We picked an interesting four player map where there was a main mountainous island surround by a ring of land. Three of us chose to start on our sections of the ring where Traci instead started on the island. I chose to try a rock factory instead of the rock pit. It takes a little longer to set up but produces more rock once it is going. I didn’t like it that much. I also realize that I should breed some donkeys as well.

The notorious Goose Thief Susan was one of my neighbors. And I was a little worried about her. But she proved benign. Instead, Adam took up that crown in this game. He stole many resources from the newbie Traci. Not just once…

But twice! She was out of the running of the game at that point. And since it was a learning game for her, she tried her hand at Goose thiefing… against me! Gah! She was able to wall of my newly created mine… So I focused my efforts at expelling her. She also dropped off a wagon in my land. However, I was able to take my revenge and wall off her rescue attempt. And she gave up on it after that. This put me out of the running as well.

You just can’t take your focus off of the goal. So I tried to see if I could force the game to end early by helping to build the wonder. Traci was building bricks in the wonder as well. But I learned that you really can’t quicken the game that much. And certinally not before others can build stock certificates…

Another aspect to this game is trying to make the components fit back inside of the box. And after much struggling and reconfiguring, we succeeded!

Tichu

Adam, Mike, and his sister had to leave soon. So they roped me into a game of Tichu. After explaining to rules to Catlyn, we were off. My first two hands were great. I called and made Tichu. However, I didn’t get very many points for my efforts. Mike called and made Grand-Tichu. Both teams scored one one-two. So we were even in Tichus but behind in points. After Mike made another Tichu call, our team needed to call Grand-Tichu. Adam forced me to call it. But Mike had all of the winners and was able to stop me for the win.

I left early to finish setting up my desk. But before I drove off, I took a picture of Ed and Susan’s new house…

Cities and Guilds

Ed and Susan are back after a long hiatus of not gaming at my house. And they brought a new game with them called Cities and Guilds. This is a tile-laying majority game. There are two kinds of majorities that you are fighting over, the most influence in one of four guilds and the most controlled buildings in a block. Tiles are placed on the board orthagonally adjacent to another tile. However, you can cross a street and still satisfy the adjacency condition. There are three types of tiles that you can place: buildings that you can place a pawn on along with bumping influence in the corresponding guild (or skip the influence and place two pawns), markets where you place no pawn but get two influence points (they also contribute to scoring), and pubs which only contribute to scoring.

Scoring is overly complex and fiddly in this game. And I pretty much ignored it and concentrated on gaining majorities. I concentrated in two guilds and three blocks. Susan surprised me with the adjacent placing and jumped into one of my initial blocks and also placed two pawns to grab the lead. Ties in the number of controlled buildings are broken by number of pawns. And you must exceed the current number of buildings in order to win back the first place ranking. So, I responded by battling back controll with Susan. Fortunately for me, Susan momentarily focused elsewhere which allowed me to finally gain first place again. Ed missed completing a block so I took advantage of that by closing it my self. This allows you to place a special building anywhere you like. So I placed it in one of my blocks.

When I placed the last of those buildings (there are only four) later on in the game, I noticed a problem. I placed it in one of my controlled blocks but it now only had two spots left. Susan noticed that she could place a building there with two of her pawns on it. This would tie in number of buildings and the number of pawns would break the tie in her favor. She had quite a maniacal and evil laugh at that point! I was hoping that she wouldn’t notice that move… Ed of course closed out the block to score a couple of points.

This was an interesting game and one I would play again.

Stephenson’s Rocket

Adam brought out this old Knizia title. It was one that I have not played in a long while. There are just too many new games coming out… And early on it was clear that Adam was in the lead and Ed and I were fighting for second. So when we both tied it was amusing.

Fjords

While Adam waited for his ride home to arrive we played this two player game. It has some aspects of Carcassonne and some aspects of Go to it. I like playing it. The first game was a tie. In the second game, we both had placed all of our farm houses on the board. So we were deperately trying to grow areas that we controlled. And I was able to end up with a bigger final area than Adam for the win.

Adam did have one amusing quote during the game: “This tile is more landy”. I am sure that it is a technical term…

There seems to be a lot of pretzel snacks left for everyone. Too bad I don’t like pretzels…

Jenseits von Theben

Marty brought Jenseits tonight after seeing us play it at Tim’s. This time we used a harder table when digging for artefacts. And harder it was. After the game was over, we learned that quite a number of artefacts had been removed from the decks during the preparation for the game.

In this game, I was a little inefficient. I got one shovel (useless). Another one didn’t show up until the game was almost over. At that point, everyone had done all of the digging that they were going to do. Which meant that the cards were useless and were left taking up space on the board. Also, not many exihibitions came up because the card display was stagnated.

Jon was impressively well balanced in knowledge in the different sites. So I was out of contention for the seven point bonus at the end. What was painfull though was I was trying to boost my most knowledge in two of the sites where I was in the lead. But the cards for those sites didn’t come up on my turn. So when I took a different card and the replacement was the card that I was looking for, I was bummed. Jon was able to take it on his turn and pip me for most knowledge in one of my two sites (giving him four more points). Sigh. Still fun to play though.

Tichu

Marty finally played Tichu with me. Our team started off strong but lost in the end to two Grand-Tichu one-twos in a row! Argh!

The Princes of Florence

Adam brought this game out to the table. It has been quite some time since I played it. Wait… let me look that info up at Dan’s site… Sheesh! I have played it on two other times: 2001-06-02 and 2002-03-14! Quite some time indeed.

After a quick rules refresher, We jumped into it. Adam did his usual strategy of building a lot of works. Which was enough to give him the win.

Ed held his yearly Memorial day gaming. It is very similiar to his game days except for the presence of bratwurst. Mmmm bar-b-queued bratwurst. When I arrived, Susan was outside taking pictures. Apparently, in the country, there are all sorts of flora and fauna out there.

Die Dolmengötter

Mike brought out his new Eggert-Spiele game that he purchased in the previous Adam-Spielt order. The last time we played the game, it was flawed and broken. But apparently, he got a rule wrong (big surprise there). So we tried it again. It was alright. Nothing special or exciting. The theme is an after-thought and doesn’t grab me at all.

Fury of Dracula

Ed posted a weird note to rrgamers. It was meant to entice people to play a new game that he bought. When I watched a video of Scott explaining the rules, it seemed interesting. And when I found out that Ed was going to be Dracula and we were teaming together to get him, I just had to play!

This is a game that pits one person against others. Dracula is hidden but leaves a path of cards. When one of the characters moves on top of that card, it is revealed. Dracula has one card of each location, so cant normally backtrack. Revealing a previous location gives a clue where Dracula has been and might be going. You also know when Dracula is in the ocean because the card back is different (colored blue).

Dracula needs to be hidden for a certain number of days, spawn a couple of vampires, kill some of the characters (who conviently ressurect), or some combination. The players want to kill Dracula. Three times. Dracula never stays dead the first time! And Dracula has a host of minions that help him out. Bitten characters also give Dracula some information.

For our first game, we caught Dracula’s trail somewhat early. But he escaped into the ocean. When we found him the second time, we thought we had the advantage. However, one character (Mina) decided to fight Dracula when she was at two hit points. Mina was rolling very good numbers and killed Dracula twice. However, Dracula played a card that allowed him to move twice and escape. He then played a card that did two damage to Mina which killed her (giving Dracula more victory points — one away from winning). What killed the game for us was the next card Dracula played was a teleport card. He is now anywhere on the board. And he is about to win when the new day occurs. There was nothing we could do about it. Sigh.

Our mistake was drawing too many event cards. While the majority of the cards are for us, there are cards for Dracula in that deck. This is the only way Dracula can get these cards. And some of the cards were very beneficial.

Mykerinos

Mike brought out Ystari’s new game out to the table. This is a set collecting game where you fight for the pieces of the set by having the majority of tokens. Each tile has two sides. The front has a picture of a character. The back has a 2×4 grid on it and it may have a number of victory points associated with it. For each of the first three rounds of the game, there are 4 groups of 2 tiles next to each other (making four 4×4 grids). In the last round, there are 6 groups of tiles. Each player then takes turns laying tokens on the tiles. You can place one token by its self or two more tokens orthogonal to an existing token. Pyramids are blocked spaces. Play continues until everyone passes. We then resolve each of the four groups. The person in first place can either take a tile or place a token on the museum. The second place person has the same choice and third and fourth places can only take tiles if noone else had previously.

Placing in the museum increases the multiplier of the five different characters. For example, if at the end of the game, you have 3 tiles of Mrs. Blackmore (black pluses) and your multiplier is 5, then you get 15 victory points. Also, on the following rounds, the characters can give you special powers that you may use once for each tile (by tapping it). The powers are: placing two tokens to start, placing three tokens next to an existing one, placing on pyramids, taking an extra token from the general supply, and placing a token on the museum.

I initially got the “Sir Brown” tile and “Mrs Blackmore”. And I realized that I could use Brown’s powers to place more of my tokens on the musuem to increase my multiplier for Brown tiles. I also concentrated my tokens to get more Brown tiles. And this gave me the win with 5 Brown tiles and a multiplier of 12.

Mauer Bauer

A Russconner (Matt) finally showed up to Ed’s to play games. The groups do not seem to mingle very much.

Mike also brought out Mauer Bauer to play. This was the second time that I played it. And this time, I did not get many good cards to score victory points with. The luck of the draw, I imagine. Still, its not a bad game. Light, somewhat quick, and abstract.

Bunte Runde

We showed up at Tim’s after Disc golfing and lunch. We had six people there and expected more soon, so we started out with a light game. John brought out Bunte Runde and was successful in convincing others to play. I was a little worried there at the start. I wasn’t getting many points. But at the end, I was able to make up for it. And Mary (sitting on my left) got many points as well. And this was enough for the win.

Bluff

The call of the dice was heard. It has been a while since I have played this game. Everyone one but Tim was slowly loosing dice. And at one point, everyone had one die (Tim had 4) and an exact match was called. Fortunately, the house rule where you cannot loose your last die saved everyone (and Tim would win). In the end, it was down to me (1 die) and Tim (4 dice). And I was able to successfully whittle him out of dice for the win! In the last round I decided to put the red die out on 1 three. I would call whatever Tim did. I figured that he could either bump it up to 1 four or five. Or 2 of something. Fortunately for me, I guessed his number. So he went with 2 threes. And lost.

Railroad Dice 2

I like dice games. Combine that with railroads and you come up with an interesting idea. I first played the second game in the series last December. It is smaller lighter and faster than its predecessor. And it also has a bad vibe in my game group. So I am reduced to playing it elsewhere. Which is funny, because Jon and John from my game group played it with me.

Jenseits von Theben

Tim owns a copy of this game (like every other game it seems). And I have been wanting to play it for a while now (ever since Marty started a game of it during a previous visit to Tim’s).

This is a game of digging for treasure. The map contains cities (London, Moscow, …) and archaeological digs. The game lasts for a certain number of years and the week is the unit of time in this game. You can move from location to location, but it costs one week for each leg of your journey. There are four cards on display that can be taken by travelling to the city on the card and waiting the time specified on the card. These cards can give you specialized knowledge about one archaeological site, generalized knowledge about all sites, shovels (get extra cards during a dig), assistants (get extra general knowledge), and other special abilities. The main goal of this game is to dig for cards. Each site has 12 treasure cards in a deck with 16 blank cards and 2 knowledge cards. When you dig for cards you consult a table where you look up your knowledge about the site and decide how many weeks you want in return for a certain number of cards. For example, a knowledge level of 6 will give you the following cards for the corresponding weeks (1:1 2:2 3:4 4:6 5:9 6:12). You can only dig at any given site once per year (baring a special card, of course). You shuffle the deck and draw the cards. Any treasure cards that you turn up you can keep for victory points.

Also, exhibition cards can be turned up during the corse of game play. When one of these cards are revealed, an exihibition will be announced to take place at a certain city during a certain week of the year. Only specified treasures from dig sites will be shown. Anyone who is in the city at the time can play. The number of cards plus a dice roll will determine who keeps the exihibition card which will give victory points at the end of the game.

When the game is over, a final test is performed. For each of the five sites, whoever has the most knowledge will get 4 points. Also, whoever has the strongest knowledge in their weakest area will get 7 points.

This was an interesting game and one that I would be willing to play again. Too bad it is so hard to come by. Adam was the unluckiest one during the game. In 18 cards that he dug up, only 4 were treasure cards. Consequently, he lost the game. I got second place and Jon first. I was really worried about Robert. He collected 7 Congress cards which gave him 28 victory points (via a triangle scoring). But I was able to beat him out since he did not collect that many treasure cards.

I came home and found that my package has arrived! Boulder games sent out a note saying that they had Antiquity in stock. It was expensive but worth it. Especially considering that Boulder was offering some coupons that would bring the price down a bit. Yeah, Splotter will eventually reprint it. But who knows how long it will take (and it will be just as expensive).

So I now have more meaty games (Antiquity, Age of Steam), light-weight but still meaty games (Elasund; Alexandros; Hey, thats my fish), and pure fluff games (Dancing dice).

Update:
Finally unpacked, sorted, counted, and stored the Antiquity game. 1/2″ x 1/2″ tokens of: 473 Pollution, 48 Stone, 48 Gold, 48 Fish, 48 Sheep, 48 Wine, 48 Olives, 48 Shells, 45 Perls, 47 Wheat, 48 Wood. 160 Grass hex tiles. 80 Graves, 12 City maps, 16 Map tiles. 1 for each player of: 20 Houses, 16 Inns, 4 Cities, 22 Cubes, 1 Stables, Dump, Harbour, Market, Hospital, Granery, Cathedral, Explorer, Forced Labour, Brewery, Alchemy, Philosophy, Biology, Univeristy.

Sesh!

During this Memorial day weekend, I could have had seven days of gaming. From Wednesday to Tuesday and in five different locations. We should have called it Memorial-con. Not that I am going to everyone of these events, mind you. But it is a cool thing…

This holiday is actually about honoring our troops. So keep that in mind when you are out there enjoying gaming!

Tichu

Adam and Mike came early. And when Jon showed up, we opened up the Tichu deck to play a couple of hands while everyone else showed up. For the first two hands, I had pretty good cards. I called and made Tichu both times. For the third, and final hand, Adam calls Tichu. Then Mike over calls Tichu. I cringe. Mike did have a Queen bomb, but Adam had a 9 bomb, the Dragon, the Phoenix, an Ace, and other cards. Adam also went out first. Sigh. I must work with Mike about over calling Tichu…

Indonesia

We broke up into two four player tables and Indonesia was on our table. I was very happy to play it again. After explaining the rules to Mike, it took us about two and a half hours to play. There was a little bit of Ashly-Rollmaning going on (and Hamzying) mainly during the Merger phase. Bidding seemed to require the most thought in this game. What was annoying was the constant queries about how much money everyone had. And unfortunately, I let it get to me. Perhaps if everyone wrote out their current total on a sheet of paper, it would speed up the game (maybe make large L.E.D. displays).

Anyways, it was still fun to play. Especially since I ending up in first by a narrow margin (it was a tight game). I will leave you with a picture of Mike Ashley-Rollmaning…

Elfenland

We had six people tonight, which is a hard number. Do you play a six player game or break up into two 3 player games (ignore other useless combinations, please)? It had been a while since we went with six. Elfenland was brought out onto the table and we all agreed. I view this game as rather dry and boring since I just view it as a travelling salesman problem with spurts of player-screwage, dealing with the bad cards that were dealt to you, and living with the poor set of tiles to choose from. But, it had been a while, so I acquiesced to the groups wishes.

I started out all right. But, during turn four, I was near Marty, who was obviously in the lead. And the difficulty chips came out on Marty’s likely path. Which happened to surround me. Sigh. It didn’t help that I recieved bad cards and unhelpful tile placements.

Traumfabrik

Mike left early. With five people, the game choices increase. And Traumfabrik was brought out. I like this Knizia gem and happily played it. I really should get off my ass sometime and print out the paste ups for this game. I like playing with the English language movies and studios rather than their German equivalent. Marty was trying to deduce the English language film names during the game and I didn’t help him much by substituting monkeys in the title (like Gentlemen Prefer Blonde Monkeys).

With so many Grimms and one Ashley-Rollman in the game, this game took a while to play. I didn’t mind the wait so much for the bidding because that is the core to the game and you need to be thoughtful about it. However, what I did mind was the agonizing waits over tile selection in the party. Mike would choose first. But before he did that, he would slowly look at each person’s movie and figure out what they would need. And then go around the table again for good measure. So, I was in no mood to do that same thing at the end of the game for the final party. Yes. I could take my time, figure out what people’s scores would be if they could choose tiles, and hose them. But that just destroys the mood of the game. This should be a nice, fun social experience and not a long drawn out calculating process.

I quickly went for the actor that I needed to finish my movie and get me some points. Yes, I should have taken the agent since it had another star and also was a wildcard. But I wanted the game to be over quickly. Mike was happy to take the agent and apparently this gave him the lead in the final scoring. I could live with that. However during the clean up of the game, I got to hear from multiple people many times of that fact. Yes, I realize that. Even after the third time you told me. Sigh. It was more painfull than the calculation. So the next time I will try and figure out what everyone needs and how to hose them.

Or, I could just play Nicht die Bohne!