Tichu

Jon continues to work up until the starting time. What a work-a-holic. So, we started a Tichu game. Initially, John was displeased for being placed on Chapel’s team. He then made us draw for partners. It was poetic justice when the cards determined that he remain with Mike.

On the first hand, John calls Tichu and was set by me. The next hand, John again calls Tichu and leads a length nine straight. This time, I over-Tichu and play an Ace-high straight. Given my three Aces and Dragon, I had an easy time of stopping John (surprisingly enough, Chapel knew I had those cards). But I don’t blame him for calling Tichu with a long straight.

For the next three hands, Doug had a natural bomb. On one, he helped me go out on my Tichu and on the remaining two, he made his Tichus.

With such a commanding lead at this point, you would think that the game would coast to the finish. But the other team came back a little bit. Mike a couple of Tichus (with Jon helping on one). However, I was able to deal the death-blow when I made my Tichu with points to spare.

McMulti

Next up was Mc Multi. I was happy when someone suggested it. It had been a while since it was last on this table. I started off spending all of my money but $13 on a refinery, a gas station, and a bunch of oil rigs. I hoped to get lucky and strike oil first. Doug saved some money to possibly switch strategies after the first couple of turns played out. Jon was on the sell gas route with no oil rigs.

When play got back to me, no one had struck oil. So i thought I had another chance at a lucky strike. But the opposite happened when I caused both a change in economics and a news event. A $50 tax on refineries came up and I had to sell almost everything to pay it off. Sigh. I probably could have recovered from that, but the dice were against me in this game. I almost never was able to sell gas on the open market while others could. And when I was finally able to sell, the price was so low that it was not worth it. So I just coasted out the game and worked on the computer. I ended the game in last place.

Double or Nothing

It must be an episode of the Twilight Zone. Because I played the same games in the same order. Weird, huh? Double or nothing did give me double the same feeling as yesterday.

Khronos

Another game of Khronos was played because we wanted to see if this game is worth it or not. Plus, the rules were fresh on our minds. For both games, we played with the variant of putting three face up cards to choose from. This is a small step in the direction of being able to choose your strategy effectively. But this game really needs a bigger hand size! In the last game, the three face up cards quickly filled up with one color and stagnated. But in this game, I noticed that different people were going for different colors. So there were cycles in what was available. I was lucky that Tim was going after purple (which I was not). Tim would grab the purple cards and replace them with orange. Which I then grabbed and put back purple. This helps if the person before you is going for a different color if you are. But it hurts if the person upstream from you is going for the same color that you want (which was Mike in this game).

I made a bad initial first move by placing a size 1 orange building on one blue and a size 2 orange building on another blue that was next to the first. I had originally planned to join them for my next move. But Jon took advantage of me by placing a size 2 orange building on the sized 1’s domain. Now I cannot join them because the best I can do is tie in strengths. And in this game ties are bad for the initiator. So, I postponed and upgraded the 2 building to a 4.

And a little bit later on, I was also in a battle with Mike. I now have two orange battles to fight (not a good situation to be in). Fortunately, I was able to tie Mike in strength and Mike was unable to attack either of my two groups. But then the pain started!

Now it is Jon’s turn and he is seriously considering joining Mike and my domains of equal strength and choosing the winner. Instead of fighting a battle that helps him elsewhere. He is not in either side of this battle. But he thinks that he has nothing better to do than to cause chaos and hope it maybe clears out the board and that eventually helps him out. So I sit there dreading Jon’s move. Because if he does that, then I am effectively out of the game. And, as if that was not bad enough, Mary is considering the same thing!! She is fighting Tim elsewhere but she is still tempted to resolve Mike’s and my battle.

Ugh! Such a painful part of that game for me. Fortunately, nothing happened and I was able to reduce Mike. Which put him out of the game. But at least the killing stoke was from the opponent and not from Joe Random Person. This variant seems to favor large buildings. And it is hard to get back into the fight when my domain covers most of the board.

At the end of the game, I never moved either of my two travelers. I only scored in the first board (“Age of Might”). But the second scoring netted me an impressive 34 points.

Double or Nothing

We started out the night with a light and easy Knizia game. It is somewhat reminiscent of Cloud 9. But for some reason, the initial impression was that you really didn’t push your luck as much as you did in Cloud 9. But I will not diss the master yet.

Khronos

John brought out his new game (although Chapel said that he played it during the last BGG.CON). Unfortunately, the rules were written in a confusing manor. Both in the overall explanation/rules flow and wordage. For example, “Rule of Dominion”, “Rule of Hierarchy”, and “Temporal Paradox”. But we eventually figured it out.

The first thing that I noticed was the lack of a buffer in this game. You have a hand size of four cards. And you can build at most four cards. You are dependent on what cards you are dealt. But certain cards are better than others. Also, you can only concentrate on two of three boards. So you have to make long term choices.

Building medium and large buildings propagate in time. Which means that they are also placed on the second and third boards. You can take a chance and build in the second board for more victory points. But the trade-off is that the buildings can be destroyed by building in the first board. Which make the orange cards the safest to build.

Also, what is interesting is that Orange buildings score on the first board and purple buildings score on the second board. Since the medium and large buildings mirror across the boards, you see the same layout. One person will be the orange majority in the first board and another person can be the purple majority in the second board.

At first, this game looked like a three-dimensional version of Tigris & Euphrates. But, given the restrictive hand size, given the fact that you have to pay two victory points to re-draw cards, and given the fact that you cannot keep cards for later turns, turns this into a very tactical game rather than a strategic game. And I don’t know if it is a good tactical game.