Games Night 29th September 2016

Despite the promise of a goodly number turning up, we had all of three in the end.
And what did we play?
We played:

AL played as the orange camels
Black camels MC played as he did.
The camels that were blue were played by PH.

MC kicked off with the first move, netting three elders and the Djinn Boaz. More stuff happened after that which would not make wholly entertaining reading so we’ll jump to the scores after the obligatory photo at about six turns into the game:

AL: 183, dominated the rescource cards, Djinns Palm Trees and Artisans with 51, 26, 18 and 18 points
MC: 156, dominated the viziers with 27 points
PH: 161, dominated the camels and artifacts with 66 and 25 points.

Well done AL!

…and that was it, we must have been tired that night.

Games Night 15th September

Tonight’s game was:

While waiting for PH, we kicked off with:

In the time it took SF to comprehend some of the rules a bit, PH had turned up. However, we saw the game through to its conclusion. AL was the first to drop out, closely followed by SF. MC was next leaving PH still standing tall with 3 dice left.
Onto McMulti…
MC spent all his money on 8 drilling rigs, 2 gas stations and 1 refinery
PH bought 12 drilling rigs, 1 gas station and 1 refinery
AL went for 13 drilling rigs, 1 gas station and 1 refinery
SF built 10 drilling rigs, 1 gas station and 1 refinery

This game saw a long time before any serious oil pumping happened and as such, the common and foreign markets were rapidly running out of the black stuff.
Quite a few doubles were rolled, sky-rocketing the price of gasoline and putting us through a depression, during which we saw a heavy investment in facilities. Then Prosperity was attained…and not a single double was rolled for the rest of the game.
AL struck oil first and MC struck last (costing about 50 million by that time). AL turned down his fifth potential well pump at $110 million.
MC took a chance and sold off two of his refineries early, declared the billion and hoped for a double to crop up. No such luck.
The final scores saw all four players reaching the (American) Billion:
AL: 1,778,000,000
MC: 1,789,000,000
PH: 1,814,000,000
SF: 1,349,000,000
The top 3 were shockingly close, but PH was the player of the night winning both games. Well done PH!

Games Night 8th September 2016

Tonight we thought we’d play PM’s new game where square footage is an actual thing to score points with:

However, while waiting for him to turn up, we played:

About halfway through the first round, PM turned up.
Stopped at the end of the round with AL at 10, MC at 9 and PH at 8.

PM kindly explained the rules and the significance of square footage. I promised to use square footage in this write up. So: Square Footage!!!
The four favours of the night were:
Number Of corridors
Square footage of corridors
Square footage of gardens
Square footage of recreational rooms
Not really a game needing a blow, by blow account. Lots of thinking happened, particularly with the Masters Builders and what order the rooms should be in the shop.
This is what it looked like near the beginning:

This is what it looked like at the end:

Key moments:
Anything to do with square footage.
PH’s lack of square acreage (his castle is in the bottom right in the above photo)
MC going skint.
AL going for the most ‘aesthetic’ castle.
PM investing heavily in L-shapes and bedrooms and L-shaped bedrooms.
MC investing heavily in recreational rooms.
PH interpreting the flame symbol () for living rooms as an onion, so onions rooms they were.
A discussion on the game’s title and whether that meant the castles themselves needed to be mad…
Final scores:
AL:- 123
MC:- 122
PH:- 140
PM:- 110
Yes, that’s right, we all beat the only person who’s played this game before.
Player of the night awarded to AL for winning a round of Rumble in the House, making the most aesthetic castle, and making a point to appreciate everyone elses castles from a practical perspective, i.e. how would a visitor literally move through the castles and room accessibility.

Games Night 1st September 2016

Two games this week.
The first was:

Being beginners, we played the Galilei map, but included the item cards in the mix.
Once the players began creeping about the darkened interior of the ship, it was very quickly apparent that MC and AL were the humans and SC and SF were the Aliens. SC (the fast alien) raced down to where the hapless humans were fleeing towards escape hatch 3 while SF took a more circuitous route via escape pod 4. When the humans realised that they were both trying for escape hatch 3 with SC right on their tail, they both did a quick switch and high-tailed it to escape hatch 4, oblivous to the fact that the other human also did so. At one point SC moved onto MC’s sector, but MC (the Engineer) kept it quiet and managed to slip on by. Both humans blundered past SF, who also missed his quarry as he too moved upon escape hatch 3.
AL (the Medic) beat MC to escape hatch 4 by 3 sectors and successfully launched. MC then detoured to escape hatch 1, while SF jumped about escape hatch 4 and SC hunted about escape hatch 2. MC reached escape hatch 1 and successfully launched, leaving the two aliens perplexed.
On an interesting side note, despite there being 40 clearly marked location boxes numbered in rows, no two players managed to fill the boxes in the same way. SC chose to go against convention and worked down the page, AL managed to miss noting a turn’s move entirely, SF included the spaces he skipped over when he moved 2 sectors and MC managed to fill them in in sequential order. I’m not saying whose way was best, but there were better ways and not so good ways and just plain different ways.

Next up was:

AL (purple) played as the
MC (black) operated as the
SC (orange) explored as the
SF (yellow) became the	e

The four aliens were pretty evenly matched, however AL was able to wheedle his way onto the offensive side and also successfully Negotiate enough times to comfortable win the game.

AL won with 5
MC scored 2
SC scored 3
SF scored 2