Antike

Another round of Antike, and this time I tried the Marble strategy. But I must have done sometime wrong, because my economy was not as strong as Marty’s was in the last game. So I was not in the running to win the game. Doug was doing well. Mike was going for cities and he controlled a lot of them, so his economy was snowballing. And Adam warned us that he was going to win on the next move. But both Jon and John, who could do something about it, did not and Mike won the game.

Beowulf – the legend

For the next game, John brought out a new Knizia game, that I own but have not played yet. It has the same mechanics of the Lord of the Rings: the card game. The strategey was not obvious at the start. But we played along and finished the game. On of the “chrome” parts of the game was the retelling of the Beowulf story. We follow a path and each spot on the path has a small section of the Beowulf story associated with it. John would read it to us at each stage. My first impression was not a good one, but I am willing it play it again.

Tichu

Ahh, another game of Tichu to finish out the night. Unfortunately, the game started out bad for us. The luck was clearly with the other team. But when the score was 125 to 475, we set their Tichu call and one/twoed ourselves. This brought us back in the running. But, again, the luck was not with us and we fell back out of the running. Adam was smack-talking me by saying how he was going to destroy me once again. When the score got to be 455 to 945, it was time for a desperation Grand-Tichu. Jon forced my call by picking up the cards. You can see above what kind of hand I had. At least I had a bomb, but what would you pass? Mike got cocky and over Tichued (he had been joking about it earlier). I was in trouble from the beginning. Then Mike played the Dragon. I was tempted to bomb it, but decided to wait. He then played a King high straight with one card left. So I was forced to bomb it. I kept the Ace at the top. And I am left with singles (low ones at that). So I sighed and started working my way down from the top. Surprisingly enough, Mike passed on the Jack and the Eight! I made it!! Even more surprisingly, Jon was able to go out second! This tied us up at 855 to 845. On the next hand, we one-twoed for the win! Woo woo!

Mike seems to have a weakness of overcalling Tichu on GrandTichu and being set.

Poor Ed, I feel for him. For lunch time gaming, he brought out Dragon Delta. This game is just full of chaos and screwage. You program 5 actions in advance. You have two types of cards that interfere with other people (a stop color from performing an action and pick up a stone/board). There are six people playing this game.

Ed is the most visible player in the group. He brings games in for us to play. He patiently explains the rules. And sometimes the price of that visibility is being picked on. In the first round of the game, three separate people played a stop red card. This resulted in Ed only being able to perform two of his five actions and it effectively took him out of the running.

Of course Lauren won the game. She is never seen as a threat.

Marty brought two of his new, expensive, game purchases. He has apparently been getting some good bonuses in his new job. Pictured above is a rare Dorris and Frank game. And the first time that I have seen it. Hopefully, he will sell it sometime to me… He also brought the 3-D Settlers. But sadly, we had five people so we could not play with it.

Bunte Runde (John says its 5:25 on Bunte time)

Another playing of this light weight Knizia game. It seems to be a favorite of John’s since he is always bringing it out on the table. This time Marty was to my left and he was working against me. I was also worried that I might not be able to score my orange items. But I was able to and get 6 points from it. Which was enough to give me the win.

Antike (Mark’s innocent looking fleet looks at poorly defended Carales and Neapolis)

Next up was Antike. I decided early to take the research path to start the game. Jon, who was on my left, and the start player, also chose that strategy. So I was doing the same moves that he did for quite a while. But we eventually diverged.

I was the ancient Carthagenians located on the shores of North Africa. No one was pushing towards me or even threatening me and Marty was my only neighbor. I initially focused on getting a defense bonus, 10 cities, and then 7 ships. I felt that getting the defense first was hurting me financially. Jon, who had gotten trade, and Marty, who was building temples, were getting more resources than I was. However, I persevered and eventually built three temples and occupied 10 cities. So this was giving me a decent production. Then, I turned to conquest. I researched both ship movement technologies which Marty seemed to overlook. Unfortunately, for Marty, he was the only person who had not researched defense and my only neighbor. And he was concentrating on defending the scary looking wall of Doug’s yellow men. So, on one turn, I destroyed two of his temples. This got me within one point of winning the game. After that, I realized that I had enough materials (both marble and coins) to build two more temples which would give me my final victory point. And luckily no one could do anything about it. Which gave me my first win!

Mu

We brought Mu to the table again which made me happy. I did make one error though. I had 5 sevens so I was bidding for chief. Marty showed seven support making him a likely partner. Jon did not want to let me have it easily and he really bid me up. When he raised it again, I could not continue the battle with my cards. But Marty then overtook Jon by one by dropping more sevens and some nines (which I needed for my bid ;-). So it was me and Marty. The mistake that I made was not keeping track of the secondary trump. I led my last trump when I did not need to (it was the only trump left). I should have kept it to rough a trick and lead my winning cards. So we were set in the end. Still fun though…

Tichu

Doug was complaining again, but he played Tichu. He did, however, limit the time to thirty minutes. When Doug was set in his Tichu call, I called GrandTichu on my next hand. It was a little risky. What was painful, though, was when Doug passed me a Jack! I was hopping for a Phoenix or Ace from him. So my weak hand was set. On a positive note, we did not finish the game with a positive score. 😉

Bunte Runde

For our first game of the evening, John brought out a newish Knizia game that was unknown to me. It is part of his games for children series. But it is playable for adults as well. There is a circle of wooden pieces that have two arributes. The first is shape and the second is color. And there is a bunch of plastic tokens in the middle that are victory chips. On your turn, you can move the marker up to three spaces and take the piece it lands on. If the piece is that last of a shape or color then it is scored. All players who have one of the attribute get a plastic chip. When the plastic chips are gone, the game is over. And that is it: simple, quick, and has some meat to it. I like it! We played with the variant that your final score adds the score of the player to your left. This gives you an incentive to get that person to finish something that you can score as well.

Thurn und Taxis

This is my second playing of this game and luck was on my side. Although Marty told us of three things that we got wrong in our first playing (one of the was: when you have no cards, you must draw two). I was always able to draw the card I wanted. I only flushed the cards a couple of times but I had more cards in my route in my hand so it wasn’t critical that I flop a card that I needed. Towards the end, I was considering how to draw cards or flush cards that Mike (who was sitting on my left) was needing… Playing for screwage in the end.

Mike wanted to steal my seat! The audacity!! He picked up my Sicherman dice and rolled the dice with the big numbers on it and gave me the dice with the small numbers on it to roll. Sadly for him, he rolled a 3. I had one number that could beat him, two that would tie, and 3 that would loose. The odds were not bad for me… and I rolled the 4!! Hehehe… not like I would have given up my seat or anything… but it was an amusing break.

Turbo Taxi

After that, we played another new game from my Adam Spielt order called Turbo Taxi. This is a remake of Friese’s game called Flickwerk. It is a simultaneous puzzle solving game in where you try and connect a network. This network must have only two exits off of the board to the houses. The other requirement is that the cars (or taxis) must be able to drive on the road to the house of the matching color. I think that I like the theme of the old game better where it is a circuit board.

Mike needed help in the first round. He called out done and then John and Jon would stop what they were doing and check the winning conditions. They would point out some failure to Mike. Which Mike would then fix and call “done” again immediately. This went on until Mike was able to finally satisfy the winning conditions. Flawed!! I just ignored them and tried to solve it myself (unassisted).

Tichu

Mike once again made a random wish and this time It took a bomb out of my hand. He did call GrandTichu on 35JQQKAP, so I will cut him a little slack there. If the Tichu caller is worried about a potential bomb, can you correctly hurt your partner? I think that getting a bomb out of the opposing team is better than the benefit of leaving your partner with a potential bomb to stop the lead of the other team.

So, my question is: in the above picture of a Tichu hand, what cards would you pass and why?

Tichu

This next game will go down in the annals of time, filed under how to loose a game when you are 690 points ahead and need 205 to win. I blame Mike, really. This is the disc-golf Tomahawk equivalent play in Tichu.

The opposing team is really far behind and clearly needs to start calling GrandTichus. We just need to coast to victory and set them occasionally. As you can see from the score card, the Jo[h]ns call GrandTichu seven times in a row and are successful 71% of the time. Which gives them 600 points. They still need 295 points from point cards before we can get 205 points from point cards. And this leaves us with the deciding factor. We need to over-call Tichu and be set… twice! Yes, the other team only has partial information. But they can make up for it a little bit since the non-caller will pass their best card. Draw backs are getting the dog and Mah Jong action against you.

I will give Mike some credit. In the picture above, he had to over-call Tichu. But, did he have to make the same mistake twice??? Tichu is a game where even though you have powerful cards, you are not guaranteed to go out first. When you loose the lead, the other team can play card combinations where you (and your partner) do not have an in to take back the lead.

By the way, for Mike’s first hand, he had dog9TTJQQD and considered calling GrandTichu but did not. He picked up 778JAA and called Tichu and made it. P.S.: If you would have called GrandTichu, it would have been another instance where we would have won…

Well game day started off scary for me. I had asked Adam to show up earlier than usual because I knew IH-35 would be bad. However, when Adam showed up in my office soaking wet and describing the 2-inch golf-ball sized hail, I knew I was in trouble. You see, I baby my truck. Ok. I drive the snot out of it, but I keep it indoors in a garage whenever possible. So the thought of hail damage was one that I was not willing to consider. However, we looked on the weather sites and determined that the hail storm had just passed. Another one was coming in from the south-east but it had a ways to come. So I thought it was safe to drive the gap. Fortunately, no hail (or heavy rain) was spotted.

Mauer Bauer

Well, after getting games from Adam Spielt, we of course had to play them. And first up on the table was Mauer Bauer. This is another abstract game from Leo Colovini. And I like it. You are building towns on a triangular grid. And when a wall is placed that surrounds pieces on the board, everyone has the opportunity to play score cards. These score cards are based on a number of different conditions, like white towers or red houses inside or outside of completed areas. Two Grimms were playing and this was our first time, so it was a little slow. But I expect future playings to be quicker. This would be a good lunch time game and I definately liked it.

Thurn und Taxis

Another new game and this one was by Andreas Seyfarth. This game was about completing routes (loosely described as mail routes but that theme is lightly applied). This game was also played slow. However, it did suffer from a couple of problems. First, you cannot plan ahead for your next move. This is because one of the actions a player can do is “clear the board”. So the chances of a city card that connects your next hop staying are slim. The next problem is that it is played like a multiplayer solitare game. There is not much interaction other than getting a better score chit for the section that you completed.

Die Dolmengotter

The next new game was a completely abstract game (well, there was a theme about Druids but that was more distracting than thematic). And this new game was the worst of the bunch. Maybe we got some rule wrong (like that never happens). But my problem with it was that you have a limited number of initial moves (4). And this game requires that people cooperate in scoring sections. However, the lesser majority goes on the bottom of the score pile and consequently receives a smaller multiplier (ex: 4x 3x 2x 1x). So, Mike wants me to help complete a score (so you can get more points that allow you to score more sections). However, if I were to do it, I would receive the worst multiplier. So I didn’t. And tried going somewhere else.

We actually had to restart the game when we realized that we got a rule wrong but it still didnt provide any incentive for people at the worse end of the deal to complete the deal. I actually hope that me missed something major here.

Ticket To Ride: Marklin Edition

Wow, another day of games. But this one was more social than gaming. Jon and Roxana invited John and Gina Gravitt and myself over for an Easter party. The house was decked out with cute Easter themed items. Jon had just recently bought this new game and I was happy to try it out. Although I am not generally fond of Ticket to Ride.

This game has more choices going on. It introduces a passenger piece that you can place on the board when you lay a track down. One of your actions is to move it along your segments and collect points chips (which start out at some number and get progressively less valuable). You can play ticket cards to move along someone else’s track. Also, this game introduces another type of engine card that is only used for tracks 4 or greater. If taken face up, it does not cost you the turn. And this game splits the destination goals into two groups (a short path for less points and long path for more points).

So they have made some progress into turning this game into a slightly meatier version. Another bonus is that all of the train cards have unique pictures of the Marklin model trains.

We took a break while the kids ran off trying to find Easter eggs.

David and Goliath

Next up was this trick taking card game. It was interesting as a three player game. Quite different from a five or six player game. However, I don’t feel that you have many choices in leading or playing cards (since you are forced to follow suit). It was rare that I was able to get only one or two of the cards in a suit (which score you the most points).

Hacienda

To finish up, we played Hacienda. Jon was able to build off by himself and created a long chain. Which put him next to a lot of markets and gave him a lot of money when he brought his herds to the markets. And which easily gave him the win.

Power Grid Italy

Its been a while since I have played Power Grid. And I generally prefer Funkenschlag over Power Grid. But I wanted to try it out with the new maps. We decided to try Italy this time. What was interesting was that with 6 players, we only used 5 sections. And because of the layout of the map, there was not many choices in which section you could leave out (otherwise you would cut the map in two). Connections up north were cheaper than connections in the south. So four of the people started off in the north. Ed decided to go to the boot. And I went a little north of him.

One of the problems in Power Grid was that phase 3 is quick or missing. However in our game we had a 3 or 4 turns in phase three. That made the game a little better. And supposedly, oil was rare in this game. So I was lucky to get a couple of wind plants when I was the last player to bid for a power plant. Unfortunately, Susan was a little out of my reach and she won the game.

Age of Steam: Germany

Since Adam and Mike were both playing Zepter, we took this opportunity to start an Age of Steam game. And we chose what looked like a hard map. Mike starts off in one area. I started out in another. And then Ed and Susan jumped right on top of us and took advantage of our positions. This effectly took Mike out of the game. And I was hurting badly (although I might have finally ended the game breaking even. But I would need to start over somewhere else). So we decided to call the game and start over.

The next time, no one else played in the area where I went. For the whole game, I was alone and was able to set up a good network. Only Susan had some slight problems in tring to make a profit.

And then for the rest of the day, we would joke about just giving up and starting over.

Settlers of Nuremburg

I realized that it has been four years since I last played this game! Wow, how time flies… So we started out the game using the recommended positions. Unfortunately I chose white and the distribution of the deck of dice meant that I never got many resources. So I was out of the game. In fact, Susan got most of the resources. So much that she was able to win the game in the first third of the timeline! The starting roads were also unbalanced. I only got tolls once during the game. Flawed!

Wings of War: Famous Aces

We ended up play this light and cute game of dog fighting. In each turn, you program three manouvers from a set of cards. These cards have arrows that describe the flight path. If your plane is within a distance and arc to an enemy plane, then that person will draw a damage card.

Susan was my partner. And whenever one of us was off a distance from the others I would use the term “off picking flowers”. In the above picture, I am on the left and Ed and Kevin are flying towards me. Susan is off picking flowers in the far right-hand side of the table!

Unfortunately, she was the first to die. So it was me against Ed and Kevin. I thought that both Ed and Keven were close to dying. Ed was a good opponent with an acrobatic plane. I took quite a lot of hits from him (and Kevin). And luckily enough, they were mostly 0s. In fact, I had 10 zero cards, 3 one cards, 3 two cards, and one three card. Which gave me 12 hit points of damage out of 15. What was cool was that I was able to take out first Ed and then Kevin for the win!

Princes of the Renaissance

Since we played Age of Steam last week, we played the pre-empted game Princes of the Renaissance. What is sad is that I have owned this game for 2 1/2 years. Sigh. Anyways, I am glad that I played since it turned out to be an interesting game.

In this game, players are one of six families in Italy. You can bid for personalities that correspond with one of the five cities on the map. These personalities may give you income (in gold or influence), and/or special abilities. You then purchase army units. These army units are used when a fight is chosen by a player between two cities. Everyone then bids influence to be able to fight as the offender or defender in the battle. The results of this battle will move the winning city up and the loosing city down in the prestige levels and give the victor a victory counter (worth triangle points). At the end of the game, cities are then ranked by prestige and assigned point values. For each personality tile you own, you add up the corresponding point value. You can also get points for 1st or 2nd gold, 1st influence, and event tiles.

Normally, if you had a strong army, you would not want to be the defender of a city that you did not own personality tiles in. And conversely, if you had a weak army, you would want someone stronger to defend that city. However, in our game, I realized that you do not have many opportunities to initiate a battle (which would allow you to move one of the cities that you favor over one that someone else favors). And, since victory counters are worth triangle points (1, 3, 6, 10, 15, …), this caused us to really bid for one side or the other in a battle. Even when it was not in our best interests.

I hope to play this game again soon!

Bootleggers

Tim had a game day, so I decided to stop by after disc golf. And we played Bootleggers. Because John keeps dragging it around and trying to get people to play it. He says that someone told him that it was a 10 game.

This game is set in the 20s when prohibition was enforced. We play gangsters who are delivering alcohol to speakeasies. And we start with one still, one truck, and one mobster. Be forewarned, this game uses a lot of dice! The stills initially have one die to determine alcohol production (you can add improvements which are extra dice and even get more stills later on). And the speakeasies have dice which determines their demand for alcohol (with improvements later on). The mobsters are used to try and control majority influence in the speakeasies. If you have the most mobsters, then your trucks will have delivery precidence. If you have at least one mobster in a joint, then you have priority over “general deliveries” (those who have no prescence). And if you have at least as many mobsters as everyone else, then you get bonus money for all deliveries. The speakeasies all have price that they pay for alcohol. The bigger the speakeasy, the more dice it uses to determine demand and the more money it pays out for deliveries. But those speakeasies need more initial mobsters in it to open it up for business.

This game does have a Chinatown like feel to it where you can barter your alcohol and trucks in order to make money. And like that game, not many people traded with me. Which really hurts. Especially when I had really bad dice rolls where I rolled a 1 four times in a row for my production. I also rolled lower than average in the speakeasy that I controlled which caused me to not be able to buy the goods that I tried to deliver.

Another negative thing about the trading is that deals are non-binding. So in John’s first trade with me, he decides to go against our agreement. Sigh. Sure, I understand that that may happen. But on the first trade at the beginning of the game? Come on!

Easy Come, Easy Go

While we waited for Jon, we played a quick game of this Knizia dice fest. The goal of three plaques were hotly contested for a bit. But John finally survived a round with three of them to give him the win.

Age of Steam

And then we got into our meaty game for the night. Since Adam and Mike were both gone to play Bridge, it was the perfect time to play Age of Steam. Chapel really wanted to play Princes of the Renaissance (and I do as well). But I made an executive decision and brought AoS to the table. Which was cool. We all were in the running to win this game.