This round went really well. It was nice to have a lot of food and people so that I could do nearly anything I wanted. Tina still won in the end, with me in second, Adam in third, and Eliot in fourth. The game went really well as I sprinted for the food upgrade, then used it as much as I could to get the great amounts of food. I then used the food to place everyone on yellow several times to do whatever I wanted and get lots more food. I placed 2 skulls and got a great Monument. Tina placed 5 skulls and took it with that. I think I get this game now, and can really take it on next time.
I was in desperate shortage for food this game. That made me not able to place many of my units. I think the next game I play will be very food focused early on and then I’ll pivot to resources, buildings, and skulls. Adam wasn’t doing too well either, but he did much better than me. Then Tina did much better than Adam. Andrew did much better than all of us. No one was particularly close to the others when it came to final score.
This game was a lot of fun. I picked it up pretty quickly and figured out that the best way to go about playing is to specialise, and then use that speciality as much as possible. I started out with two upgrades on the food track and quickly picked up a building that game me the third. I used that to get a ton of food and then used the trading center to exchange the food for other resources. I didn’t use the aspects of paying to go back nearly enough, and I didn’t do as much picking up and replacing as much as I could have. I’d really like to play it again, as I think I could do much better. I played with Adam, Nick, and Brian. Adam ended up winning, but by only one point to my close second.
Last night I went to Box for board games night there. Nick, Peter, Brian, and myself played Timelines, a game of time travel to exploit markets. I got a pretty good handle of end game conditions from the get go, but with the way the game was played there was no way to know what you would be able to do next turn. Anyone could completely throw off your ability to do something, which would then make you waste more turns trying to get back to a state where you could do it, just to be foiled again. If people were only trying to do what was best for themselves then this wouldn’t be a big issue, but it was so easy to block someone that you couldn’t finish the game. It was especially true when there was one clear leader, which is the position I got into early on since I chose the specializing strategy, which paid off well in this game. I still ended up winning by a large margin.
We also played Avalon last night, which was a good bit of fun. We had up to 9 players in one game, and we also included many of the special characters. I got to be a special character most of the time, which was really nice. I won most of the games I was a part of, but in Avalon it is hard to make sure anything specific happens. I did lose when I was Merlin, which was disheartening. The guy playing Percival didn’t know what to do, so he didn’t back me up when I pointed out the bad guys I knew. A suspicious play by Candice also made me think that she was Mordred when it was actually Adam. All in all it is a well balanced game with a good bit of manipulation.
I introduced Nima to the worker placement genre with Stone Age last night. I used Nick’s strategy of getting a large population and never feeding them. This works out if you continually get points, and I was able to get 12 huts. I was able to get a score of 187 and Tina had a score of 178. Jeff didn’t do too well as he didn’t choose a strategy. Tina was using the card and agg strategy. Nima had fun, but didn’t know enough about what he was doing to get a good score. He did copy us decently well, so that his score wasn’t bad.
Brian, Tina, and I played some Suburbia, and it was the craziest game of it I’ve played so far. We got off to an odd start, with me making an industrial loop off the bottom. Brain went for a concentrated business district and was doing really well with it. Tina got into the Mints and Community Parks. I ended up getting a power plant and taking off in income, Brian did the same with his business district. Brian then got a PR firm and doubled it to get a feedback loop of passing lines to increase reputation. I got a Stadium and put many greens around it, then put it in the recycling plant into the center of my industrial loop. Those two combined for a super powerful combination of income and reputation, and I was able to keep almost maxed out on both. Brian lost traction on the income as his doubled PR firm really went insane. He was ahead by a lot before taking the bonuses into account, but I took all the bonuses and got a total score of 139, the highest score I’ve seen so far.
Tina and Mark played Race for the Galaxy with me, and as expected Tina won with me in a distant second. She is quite the veteran and the only way I could expect to beat her at it is to have a really lucky draw. She ended with a moderate score of 69, but since I was playing a rushed military strategy that wasn’t too strange. I ended up with 44 points and Mark had 39. I also had 2 prestige coming from every produce, which essentially put a block on her produce, so she went alien for the win.
I played factory fun with Tina, Jeff, Mark, and another guy I don’t really know. Mark I don’t know well either; he is one of the guys from the Stanford board games group. The game went really well for me and I got a score of 102, the highest I’ve made. The score board only goes up to 105, so I feel really good about the score. The guy I didn’t know decided to give up after he couldn’t place a machine and lost track of where he started before that turn. I did the same on my first play through of the game.
This was a really good game, but it was a little too complicated and we didn’t interact much. The game could have been different if we fought each other, and I had considered attacking Tina to stall the game. We all went the merchant route and Tina beat me, with Jeff in 3rd.
It's an Exciting World 