Manila

We started out the night with five players. Not many games immediately come to mind with that number. Fortunately, we picked a new game to play. And after reading all of the rules and waiting for everyone to shut up and stop interrupting during the rules explination, we started playing. Manila is a game that uses dice to move three ships into harbor. There are three dice roles, during which each player can place one piece to bet on what the final outcome will be. You can bet that a certain number of ships will arrive safely or that a certain number will fail to arrive. You can bet that a cargo will arrive. And there are a couple of different power spots to place your token at. The first is a pilot that can either help or hinder a ship. Another is a pirate that can board a ship or get its bounty. The last is the insurance agent who pays for ships that fail to make it into port.

The other aspect to this game has a Modern Art feel to it. You start the game with two wares. If you win the action to become harbor master, you may buy another ware. And when ships make it into port, their wares increase in price. So you are trying to increase the value of cards that you hold and hurt the other cards.

In this game, I was never harbor master. You save money by not paying for it. But you are at the mercy of who wins and therefore which order you go in. You want to go sooner rather than later. Doug was to my left and he won a number of times. This meant that I went last a number of times. But it was good in that Doug was helping the cargoes that I held. Late in the game, I decided to bet on some extreme long shots. I paid 2 dollars for a 15 dollar reward if none of the boats made it. And luckily they all failed to make it! This happened twice, which I think is the reason why I won the game. Everyone in this game was trying to get two ships into port. Another possible strategy is to place all three as far away as possible and hope that none of them make it in. But noone tried that approach.

Schnappchen Jagd

Two people left for the night. Which left us with three. Jon suggested this trick taking game. I was a little rusty in the strategy but fortunately, everyone was as well. Doug was giving me too many tricks with the junk that I was collecting and not trying to hurt me. So I think that that helped me win the game.

Diamant

While we were waiting for Adam and Mike to show up, we decided to play a quick filler game. I pulled out Diamant. It is a good push your luck game with an element of chicken thrown in. I don’t understand why the Grimms hate this game so much.

Struggle of Empires

So now we had six people. Our options were to split up into two three player games or one six. Medici and Union Pacific were brought up. But fortunately, I remembered that we have not yet played Struggle of Empires. And fortunately, everyone was interested in playing. So we struggled through reading the rules and then started the game. I picked blue which turned out to be France.

The first thing that you do after setting up the board is to detemine the two sides for a war. The game is played over three wars and during each war, you get five turns of two actions apiece. Looking at our starting positions, I deternimed that Mike and Adam were threats to me. So my goal was to get them on my side. And fortunately, that turned out to be the case. I only had to bid three gold to make that happen.

Since Mike was my ally, he asked me for help in defeating John. He told me that he would help me in defeating the Germans during my turn. So I agreed. He rolled badly and caused both him to loose and myself to take a loss of one army unit. I decided to wait on attacking those Germans and going after the Central Europeans. He then decided to attack again. He asked me for help once again. But this time, he made it clear that he was not honoring the previous agreement. Since he wasn’t going to help me out, I knew he wasn’t going to honor this agreement either so I decided not to help him. Three times later on during the game I asked for him to hold up his end of the bargain. And three times he refused! So let it be known from this time forward that Mike is a welcher!

While we were playing, we determined that this game was going to take quite a while to play. So we decided to stop after the first war and call it as a learning game. Too bad. Because after Doug was determined to be the leader, everyone picked on him. And then it was Adam and Mike’s turn. Which left me winning the game!