Gloria Mundi

Another playing of Gloria Mundi for me. I am trying to see if this game is not flawed. This time, I am trying to keep my resource cards alive as long as possible in order to gather more income. However, we played this game with 6 people. That seems like a lot of people. You only get three white and yellow cards. Things went okay at first. Everyone was paying off the barbarian. However, when it got around to Adam, he didn’t pay off the barbarian. At this point, Mike and John were able to build victory point generation building. So Adam was trying to set up a group-think situation where we could hurt him. However, he had to work through both Jon and myself before getting at Mike. And both Jon and myself have different opinions on what is the best course of action for ourselves. He proved to be unsuccessful at his attempts.

Towards the end of the game, it really broke down for me. I was able to generate three greens and one victory point for every green card that was played. I also had one yellow card with a yellow building and one white card with a white building. In my hand were only green cards. Every time that it was my turn to play, there were no green building cards in the display! So I did nothing. This went on for four turns. I collected so many green blocks that we ran out. And yet no green building was seen. How very flawed!

The order of winners in this game corresponded to the victory point cards that they were able to buy. Every other building card was essentially worthless. This game needs some fixing. Either the ability to trade cubes for other cubes, or score points for cubes at the end, or auction off building cards, or something.

During the game, Adam is bored and plays with his white peace chiklets.

Mu

John had to leave early. So we had 5 people for a game of Mu. Adam and Jon are both aggressive bidders. Here, my 8776 is not worthy of attraction from a potential chief. Mike though was. His 99997 allowed Adam and Jon to over bid even more. Jon won that battle with a 9 card bid. He called green as trump and Adam called 1s. Sadly, he was set by 4.

Tichu

Ahh, Tichu was next when Mike left. The first picture is my hand when Doug calls Tichu. Say what Dougie? You know you need some control cards in your hand, don’t you? I was able to help him make his Tichu call and go out second for the 1-2. The next picture is Jon’s hand for his Tichu call. Pretty unstoppable.

Evo

John held another day-gaming session. Since I was on vacation and had nothing better to do, I went. Susan showed up. And Ed took off work to play with us. So John did some research and came up with a list of 5 player games based on Ed’s recommendations on the ‘geek and John’s games that he has not played. Evo was first up. I always like to play it. I may not win it. But it can be fun at times to play.

Especially when you have horns. But the auctions were such that I got another horn. Over specialization is a bad thing. You really want a balanced creature. Able to move fast, have lots of babies and survive in inhospitable climates. Which is the opposite of my creature. I could only do one thing — attack. And I went on a rampage. Much to Ed’s dissapointment. He wanted to be left alone but he looked like a tasty morsel to me. The only problem with attacking is that you are not guaranteed to always win. So you should only attack as a last resort. My clan slowly died off. So sad.

Il Principe

Next up on the table was a game that Mike had bought a while ago. We played it once (incorrectly). And then never played it again. So it was mostly a new experience to me. Not one that I liked either. It went on too long for the type of game that it was.

Loopin’ Louie

Ed and Susan had to leave. So did Gina when her loud and annoying alarm went off (reminding her to pick the kids up from school). John tried to tempt me to stay to play another game. However, I was leaning against that. But I spied the title of “Loopin’ Louie” and I wondered what it was. John takes it out and sets it up for me. So we play it. Its a cute manual dexterity game of trying to knock down the other person’s chickens with a common plane. The only thing that you can do to affect the plane is to spring it up in the air when it passes you. If you time that move perfectly, you can bounce the plane up and over the opponent’s spring and have it hit their chicken. A little bit off, and you can have it go far enough to not let the opponent get a swing at it. Mostly, you just take a stab at it. Which is returned by the opponent. When Clint showed up from school, he jumped right in. I was out early. So I helped him get his father out in revenge.

Just the sort of game that would make Adam’s head explode in a cloud of fluff.

Guh, my truck is getting so old!!!! Everything is too spread out around here.

On the drive out to South Oklahoma, I mean Liberty Hill, I passed a Circus. What a rainy and miserable day for a Circus.

Hornochsen

Ed held a game day. Its been a while since I have been to one. We started off with Hornochsen — a milder form of Take 6. You have a hand of card to get rid of. You are trying to avoid negative cards. And you place the cards following simple rules of closeness. But it plays differently. You still have a sense of impending doom. However it is very watered down and dampened. In this game, I had no opportunity to take stacks of 5 positive cards. So I waited it out. I had a feeling that others would soon be forced to take the stacks which held the big negative cards. And it worked out that way for me. I ended up finishing the game with a small positive score. In this game, that is a good thing.

Gloria Mundi

After playing two very flawed versions of this game, I had to give it one more chance. Rio Grande does not publish bad games. However, after playing it, I think we could have played it better. You see, this game is a return on investments game. And you should be trying hard to keep your income generating cards in front of you. Instead of discarding them in order to hose your opponents.

Leonardo da Vinci

My second playing of this game. And basically, the same thing happened. You finish the game and punish yourself for playing it inefficiently. You do not want to have, in your possesion, unused resource cards. They are useless and you have wasted money and meeples to get them. Also, you want both your labs to finish a work before the game ends. If one or both are idle, it costs you victory points. The problem with this game is you just cannot predict which invention cards will come up and then properly plan for them. Yeah, you can look at the next four in the queue and reorder them. But other people will as well.

Here, Ed takes a picture a picture like this.

Nexus Ops

Adam got me to play Nexus Ops. Which is a positive rating for me. He likes meatier games. So if he is willing to play a dice-fest game, there must be something to it. And I didn’t mind playing the game at all. It reminded me a lot of Samurai Swords. There is a heirarchy of troops that you can buy. The more expensive hit first and are more likely to hit. The cheapest hit last and rarely hit. You manuever over territory to acheive secret objectives that you collect. And it is relatively quick to play. I liked it.

My problem was that I was to timid in attacking others. I was building up for a big fight. But Carl was able to win the game before I would. I should have went for it one round earlier.