Game Day 09/22/2005

Game #1

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.

Game #2

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!