Friday, August 3, 2007

Session Report July 31, 2007

Attendees(7): Warren, Sharon, Michael, Barbara, Steve, Troy, David
We had a small group for gaming Tuesday night at our house.
This one has been played a few sessions in a row but I have yet to play it. This civilization game requires players to deliver 4 sacrifice tokens in order to win but there are lots of activities that you can do in order to build up the mana needed for the sacrifices. Sharon won (4) while Barbara (3), Troy (2), and Steve (2) finished behind her.
This is a short game (exactly 30 min) with a clever mechanic where everyone plays the game in "real time" and your actions are limited by sand timers and the time it takes them to "run out" so you can complete your actions. It is an interesting game that probably doesn't have deep replay value but it is light and quick and fun to play every once in a while. We only played the basic game so I'm sure the advanced rules add more depth and strategy to the game. However, since I made an illegal move about 5 min into our game (using the basic rules), I'll just stick to the basic game first... Anyway, we restarted the game and this time I played correctly. The basic strategy is to build up your resources and deliver them to the other player's stations to fulfill demand and score victory points. You can also add more technology to your station which allows you to produce more goods, transform goods, or add cities with large demands. The advantage of having lots of demands is that you receive some victory points for having demands that other players fulfill during the game. I was not able to deliver many goods during the game but I had the most demand and was fortunate that Warren was able to make a delivery as time expired to give me a 1pt victory while Warren and David finished tied for 2nd.

After Space Dealer, I taught David Elasund. This is an interesting game, in the Settlers genre, with some good strategic options but the actions during a turn are not intuitive and take some time to learn. You use Gold and Influence to build various buildings within Elasund, the First City of Catan. City Walls, the Chapel, and many production and Victory Point buildings are avaliable and 2 dice determine resource allocation. In this game 5's were popular and Warren ran away with a fistful of cards and never really was challenged. David made a run at the end and I actually lost several late VP's as Warren built a large building and removed one of mine that also had valuable trade VP's attached to it. Warren won (10), David was 2nd (7) and I finished with only (2).

This is our only copy of the Carcassone series and I am very happy with this game. It has a well balanced mix of tiles with an easier scoring mechanism than its predecessor. Heather joined the adults and played this one too. Final: Sharon (55), Barbara (53), Heather (47), Steve (27), and Troy (22).

Sharon (won) played this light dice game with Barbara (5) , Matthew (8), and Heather (16) to close out the evening.

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