Amyitis

First up tonight was Amyitis. This is an interesting game. But probably not one that you should play only once every year (or six months) or so. There are many ways to score. And it helps to keep previous playings in mind when you play this.

Tichu

Doug was getting all of the cards at the beginning. He made four Tichus in a row before finally being set.

Due to, not one, but two scoring errors we thought we were clawing our way back to victory. First, we called and made two desperation Grand-Tichus. The score was 910 to 990. We needed to call Tichu, make it, and then score at least 45 points. Which we did!

Sadly, that version could not stand up to the scrutiny of entering the score into the system…

Big Three

While we waited for Marty to show up, we played a couple of hands of Big Three.

Through The Ages

Its sad that out of all of the more than five-hundred games that I own, Jon only wants to play less than a handful of them. He didn’t even want to play Antiquity, which I thought that he liked. So we played Through the Ages.

I tried going for a military economy. Chapel was out in the lead with a good point generating economy. At the mid game, Chapel was still in the lead, so we knew that we had to do something. I was able to assassinate his leader only two turns before the era ended. Marty built up his military and declared war on Mike. Mike was not able to defend against the aggression and went from first to third. Marty scored a lot of points towards the end of the game and this clinched first place for him. I secured second and Chapel was able to beat Jon for third place.

I stopped by Monument Cafe for food before First Friday games. I wanted to try their quiche or perhaps their yard-egg breakfast, but their choice of vegetables cinched it for me. I ordered: roasted beets, onion rings, fried eggplant marinara, and a black-eye bean salad with tomatoes and green peppers (that was more soupy than salady).

Toledo

Ed brought a new Wallace game. But this game is quite a departure from Age of Steam or Struggles of Empires. It is a lightweight family game about making swords. You can attempt to hose others by landing on their spot and challenging them. But the fights are decided randomly by flipping over cards (best two out of three). You can train to get advantages but the trade off is that you loose victory points at the end of the game.

Blue Moon City

And after the Wallace lightness, I played some Knizia lightness. Sigh. So sad.

Wow, I guess I can’t call this game gathering First Friday Fluff anymore. Someone brought and played Agricola. They even went to the effort of creating animeeples out of sculpey clay.

Parthenon: Rise of the Aegean

Chapel brought out a new game that he bought a while ago but has not played yet. It is a civilization type game that is played with a bunch of cards. After working through the rules, we started to play. The problem with this game is that there are an awful lot of bad events in this game. Each year has four seasons and, during each season, an event was played. Every event that year had negative consequences and caused our building efforts to slow down. You can ship your goods to near and far markets to trade for other goods. But the problem with shipping is that event cards are drawn for the voyage (either one or two). Well, the chances for negative events are high!

All of these events got to me and, after skipping building for a couple of turns, I finally gave up playing the game. There was no way I would ever get out of last place. I don’t think I will play this game again either…

Big Three

We finished off the night playing Big Three…

Das Zepter von Zavandor

Cool. We played a game of Zepter. I started off strong. I was able to build my economy up to four diamonds before everyone else. But I just kept it there and let the other people catch up in income generation. The endgame took far too long for my strategy. We did have an amusing ending though. Someone myself, Doug and Jon ended up having the same number of victory points. And this game does not have a tie breaker!

Clippers

Wow, it has been a long time since we played this game (or its identical twin Santa Fe Rails). I would like to play it again while the strategy is still fresh in my memory…

Big Three

Another game of big three (which seems to be Jon’s favorite three player game to finish out the evening). I had one great hand. And it got even better when I picked up three Aces and one three! No contest really…

Pampas Railroads

I finally finished my custom board for Pampas Railroads! And, to celebrate, we played a game of it. Bidding was interesting. The initial stocks went for quite high prices. This meant that people, who bid high, ran out of money. After that I was able to get some shares for cheaper prices (essentially one dollar more than what other people had).

I had shares in almost every railroad. And the one railroad which I had a lock on (3 out of the possible 5), was doing the best in income. Chapel had the other two minor shares. So I was able to keep a delta over him. For Chapel’s majority railroad, I had the other two shares. His railroad was lower in income. And I would be able to keep my railroad’s income higher than Mike’s. Unfortunately, Jon had neither of those two railroads. He did have controlling interest in one railroad. But it was not enough to account for our double arrangement. So that was one negative aspect of this game for three players.

Big Three

We finished off Pampas Railroads early when it was clear that the standing were not going to change. We finished off the night with a game of Big Three. Nice and light.

Wabash Cannonball

Yeah! I was able to successfully get a game of Wabash Cannonball played at the meetup. Susan was kind enough to agree to play with me. Unfortunately, I had to sit through a horrible new game by Mayfair or daVanci. It was bad enough for me to not even call out its name now in the fear of giving it publicity.

Wabash was cool though. It did well enough at the start. But I didn’t get another share or two when I should have… Oh, well.

1861: The Railroads of the Russian Empire

Mike brought over an 18XX game for us to finally try out. Unfortunately, Chapel had not really read the rules. So we spent a lot of time going over the rules and trying to figure them out. These rules were bad in that they did not have any examples when we needed some. Jon was falling asleep during this and was not very motivated to play it right now. So we quit after one turn.

Big Three

He was motivated, however, to play Big Three.

Big Three

While we waited for Jon to show up, we showed Doug Big Three. I don’t think that he was impressed…

Race for the Galaxy

Our first real game was Race for the Galaxy. This time, I started off with Old Earth. And it looked like I should be focusing on a trading/shipping strategy. So I tried that out. However, I started off too slow. It took me a while to get my first planet, an alien robotic factory (cost 6), down. I was able to get down replicant robots (-2 settle) and terraforming robots (1 more card when settle). It seemed that I was quite the robotic -philiac person.

No one was producing. That hurt me. And I noticed that it took three turns in order to get a high value card down (produce, trade, develop/settle). I couldn’t really latch on to other people’s selections to help me shorten that cycle down. Also, I didn’t really get down good level 6 development cards. The Galactic Rennaissance and the Galactic Federation didn’t give me huge bonuses. But it was enough to get me 2nd place.

Tichu

It has been a while since we have played Tichu. So sad. I started off with some bad luck. On my first hand, I random-wished my partner’s two-bomb. But he still called and made Tichu. In first three hands, I did not see an Ace. So on the fourth hand, when I had a risky Tichu hand, I went for it. I wished for an Ace to try and promote my hand a little bit. But I called out Jon’s Ace.

For the last hand, if we called GrandTichu, made it, and scored more than 35 points we would win. Unfortunately, that was not the case.