Session Report - January 2, 2007

Attendees(10): Steve Walker, Matt Asher, Jaimie Asher, Andrew Bradley, Michael Hall, Sharon Madden, Warren Madden, Andy Manning, Eileen Tooke, and Adam Whitney

We all gathered at Steve's house and split into two groups.

The Larger group of 5 players finished the 2nd half of their game of Advanced Civilization. Steve, Andy, Sharon, Warren, and Adam all participated in this epic struggle of ancient...well.. civilizations. I believe that Warren won this one, but I don't have more to report although it appeared that everyone enjoyed the experience and would like to try it again sometime.

Power Grid - Benelux

Matt, Jaimie, Andrew, Eileen and I proceeded to build power plants in Benelux (Belgium, Luxemburg, and Netherlands) with the new Power Grid expansion. The expansion comes with two new boards and a small set of special rules for each board. Unlike France and Italy, where the expansion had special rules on certain resources but the overall recource chart was the same, the two new boards each have their own resource charts with various repleneshments for different numbers of players. In Benelux, the board is smaller (one region has only 1 city!) and the costs between cities is very small. Oil is cheaper and replenishes faster than coal in Benelux. Wind Energy is slightly more available due to some special rules. Finally, instead of removing the "largest" power plant during bureaucracy, you remove the "smallest" power plant. All of these changes result in a shorter game. I got the number 3 plant (which is good when Oil costs 1), but because I placed first I was somewhat surrounded in the center of the board. Andrew built south of me and had several large coal plants. Jaimie and Eileen were building in the North and East respectively. Matt was able to buy both large Garbage plants in this game and use them to good effect before garbage price/re-supply became an issue for him. He bought into the 7th city and pushed us into Step 2. As it turns out, we never got to step 3 as Matt was able to build to 15 cities 2 turns into step 2 and win the game. Jaimie made a great comeback and finished 2nd just ahead of Andrew. Eileen and I were just too far back in cities and unable to close the gap. A very enjoyable variant and I'm anxious to try it again (next time we will include the single city region and with enough players there might not be a step 2....).

Ticket to Ride 1910

Matt and Jamie left and Civiliations were still trading in the other room, so Andrew, Eileen, and I got out the 1910 Expansion for Ticket to Ride. It was Eileen's first time to play TtR and she picked up all the strategy she needed by locking me out of New York early in the game (and I had two tickets with NY on them!). We were playing the Mega Game with ALL the new tickets and both bonus cards. It was a cut-throat game and Andrew was able to win since he completed more than 1 of his tickets! 1910 adds a lot of replay value to TtR and really balances out the US board. I think the Big City variant will be an interesting challenge for next time.