Dragon Surprises

Eitan, Eszter, Gili, Nadine, Kate

Nile

Eszter+, Nadine, Gili, Eitan

Ezster passed a large Ethiopian demonstration on the way; that caused Kate’s bus to wander all over the city. We played Nile while waiting, Eszter’s first play. No one could get all the types they needed, despite knowing what we wanted, but Eszter managed to get one of each and some extras. There aren’t that many turns in a 4-player game.

Year of the Dragon

Nadine 105, Eszter 104, Kate 98, Gili 96, Eitan 90

First play for Eszter, Gili and I both own copies of the game. Gili started off really strong, with a lot of buildings and people. She didn’t have many end of round points, the rest of us had dragons, I got mine first round. It took a while for the rest of us to be able to build so we kept replacing people, and the order of disasters was challenging despite third round being fireworks. Eszter was behind in turn order the whole game, was losing a lot of people, and had a hard time catching on. Eitan hadn’t played in a long time and was also having a hard time, as was Kate at first because she had to lose a lot of people due to lack of building space, though they both got fireworks points.

I didn’t build til about half way so lost people too, and I never had any helmets so lost two people to that. Eszter only had two medicine bowls even for the first plague. Then, even though she had a building strategy and the most people, Gili stayed ahead in turn order and went into a book point strategy with 3 book tiles, so she caught up on points. Eszter managed to get enough money and book tiles to pay for books twice and advance. By the last two rounds we weren’t sure who was ahead, Kate and Eszter were ahead on points on the board for a while. I had two double tile point multipliers on 3 levels for 12 points, but Gili had one multiplier for 6 points. I took 3 coins 3 times instead of actions to pay for actions like rice and building; I got two points for taking rice on my last turn, Eszter had one from money. It was a close game and the results surprised us because we didn’t calculate them in advance. Eszter played very well for her first game. And Gili impressed everyone with good play – shows how wrong we can all be, and how the game balances out. Peace.