Tonight was Smart-Mike’s last day in Austin. He is on a quest to become smarter by going back to CMU for some amount of years. I wish him luck in his endeavour. Too bad he is leaving, Tichu will become harder to play…
We started out with Antike. We had six people which is a good number for Antike. Everyone knew the rules and played quickly… well, everyone but Smart-Mike who did a lot of Ashley-Rollmaning…
I was pretty much left alone during the game. At one point, John decided to attack one of my cities. He was getting squeezed by Mike, Adam, and Marty. So he decided to venture into my territory. Unfortunately, he did not have quite enough to take over the city he wanted. I spent a while kicking him back out.
Mike was agressive and took a risky expansion strategy which paid off for him at the end. He was able to win the game. We did a new rules variation where if you have researched all of the technology, you can get a victory point (choose from any card). Chapel was mean and took the card I was going after… hehe… oh well.
Mike Chapel brought a new game for us to try out called Credit Mobilier. The production values are pretty low and look like pre-schoolers designed and built it. It is a somewhat quick dice game about trying to make money by moving goods from one side of the board to the other. The fatal flaw in this game is the five dice. These dice determine what actions you are allowed. If you roll horribly, you are hosed. And if you continue to roll badly, you really hate playing this game. There is a general fund (colored purple) and 4 company funds (colored red, blue, green, and yellow). For each share that you purchase, you get payed off a dollar from the company coffers. Due to the setup of the board, some shares look more promising than others, so you try and purchase their shares. But you must roll the color of the company on one of the five dice. Are you starting to see the dice problem? When you build track (again having rolled the color) or move goods along a track (rolled of course), money is deposited into the different company coffers. If you are lucky enough to own shares in a company, you will want to initiate a payout. But you have to roll the color of the company AND an orange color (adding to the general rolling problems).
I don’t think that I would recommend this game to anyone. But I thank Mike for having taken one for the team and purchasing this game for me to try out…