Caylus
Jon 86 Aaron 82 Haim 43
Aaron and Haim’s first play. Haim didn’t realize how important the castle was.
Five Tribes
Nadine 186, Gavriel 158, Zvi 143
Nadine: First play for them. I had 9 cards and most yellows. Gavriel spent a lot of time thinking and optimizing, and made good moves. Only 2 Jinns were bought. They liked the game.
Tichu
Haim Nadine+, Jon Aaron
Jon and Aaron were teaching Gavriel.
Participants: Jon, Nadine, Gili
We played on Tuesday, because Wed was even more difficult for people. A small game night even so.
Gili said she would be late, and many of my games are still in boxes so I pulled this one out almost at random. Nadine doesn’t particularly like it, but I do. It’s little like Dvonn: hard to fathom why the early moves matter until you get closer to the end game, but the more you play, the more it seems to make sense. Still, the game, like a NIM game, will suddenly kill you if you don’t plan well ahead, and I lost to Nadine by one round.
First play for both of us. We played with a variant I heard online that lets you play one part of the parenthesis and take the other one from a pile set aside at the beginning of the game. Still the game play seems rather uninteresting, especially is you have an ergo and the opponent doesn’t, and the game moves seem rather limited. I will have to look up more commentary on the game. I got the game mostly because of the cool, geek theme.
Nadine 125, Jon 120, Gili 80something
We haven’t played this in a while, because I am of the opinion that it is just too long and fiddly, and I don’t like the provost mechanic, though I can see it’s appeal. My opinion didn’t change after this play, and I think my fellow gamers felt similarly. We didn’t do TOO much provost attacking, but enough to keep people away from the end of the line unless they took the “move the provost three spaces” action. Nadine took an early lead by monopolizing all of the best buildings, including every possible way to produce stone. She must have gained 50 points from people using her buildings (more than 5 a round, I believe). I planned for the best blue buildings, but Gili squeaked out the 25 point building ahead of me. It wasn’t enough to really hurt me; after all it costs 11 points in resources to take it.
Next time we’ll try Calyus Magna Carta.
Participants: Jon, Gili, Abraham, David K, Bill, Nadine
A lovely bunch of regulars.
Abraham 24, Gili 22, Jon 22
First play for Abraham, though he has played Puerto Rico and Race for the Galaxy, so this wasn’t much of a stretch. Of course, he didn’t know the cards as well as we did.
That didn’t stop him from putting together an awesome synergy for trading: Market Post, Well, Trading Post, and so on, all working perfectly together. Gili followed with higher paying production buildings and Aqueduct, while I had only my lone Indigo Plant the entire game, going the Quarry and Carpenter route. Word to the wise: if your opponents are crafting and trading, you’re not going to make much money unless you can benefit from their role selections, too.
Still, I had good luck picking 6 point buildings. Abraham didn’t pick any, so he just built quickly to end the game as fast as possible while he was ahead. Gili got out a Guild Hall and I got out a City Hall, but it wasn’t quite enough.
David 17, Nadine 6, Bill 2
First play for Bill (or perhaps second). David likes this game a lot, which surprises me, as it doesn’t strike me as his type of game.
David 160ish, Abraham 150ish, Bill 110ish
Don’t have the exact scores, but something like that. David thought he made mistakes, so naturally he won anyway, though Abraham came close.
Jon 124, Nadine 107, Gili 80ish
We searched around for a game that both Nadine and Gili liked, since they don’t like my favorite games. I’m less than enthused by Caylus, but don’t play games only if I hate them (like Fluxx). I find Caylus to be overly dry, overly long, and – strange as it may sound – not requiring too much thinking. It’s actually a pretty forgiving game if you keep your eye on the victory points. Or perhaps I just don’t care who wins, after five levels of converting money to workers to cubes to buildings to more building to yet more buildings.
Nadine took the first favor, I but I quickly jumped ahead in favors. I got to the end track in cubes, so that I could get the gold cubes I needed, and of course the end track in buildings, which is required to win. I also don’t neglect the gray buildings, whose point return is quite good, or the castle.
The provost doesn’t get much play in a three player game; I lost out on using one building on one turn, which I couldn’t really afford to use, anyway. We all seemed to have a lot of money most rounds.
And since we hadn’t played in a while, and the board is really poorly designed, Gili got confused by the rule of which level of the favor track you can use in which phase. I also reminded them about placing workers on your own building for only one coin, even after others have passed. Knowing the rules better gave me a slight but unfair advantage.
Abraham 45, David 31, Nadine 20ish
The only card that trashed other cards was the Thief, and it trashed your opponent’s cards. David used Thief a few times only to realize that he was helping rather than hurting his opponents by trashing their coppers. Abraham drew a completely synergistic deck which drew itself in total on every turn.
David reached a buying power of 19 on one turn, which is the most I’ve ever seen.
Jon 12+, Bill 6
First play for Bill. A learning experience. I really really love this game, because, while conflict is an option, you don’t lose much if you lose a combat. The object is to gain points, not territory. And no dice rolls!
Bill was trailing on my Know-hows, and working at expansion, ignoring my immanent poise to strike. I then swooped in an sacked two of his temples, netting two destroyed temple points, one “five cities” point, and one “seven seas sailed” point in one turn. Since it was getting late, and I was now winning 12 to 6, I suggested he resign, which he did. But he liked the game.
Participants: Jon, Nadine, Elijah, Zack, Gili, Hillel, Avraham, David K, Saarya
Game night was a day early, owing to a conference I’m attending tomorrow night. We didn’t have a chance to test my prototype. Zack attended last year, but his family went back to the states. He’s here for a few weeks, but tonight will be his only game group appearance. Elijah also returned after a long absence.
Nadine 101, Elijah 97, Hillel 92, Zack 83
First game for all but Nadine, who had to explain it a few times as players slowly arrived at the club and needed to hear the explanation from the beginning.
Nadine writes: Zack lost points due to getting the least explanation due to coming late. I only won because no one [else] had played before.
Jon/David 84, Avraham 74, Gili 58
We played about half the game and then I got up to let David finish my position when he arrived. I’m not thrilled about the game anyway.
I gave David an ok but not thrillingly good position. He promptly made a mistake in his inherited position and lost ground. And yet, he still won the game. Go figure. This was Avraham’s first play and he underestimated the importance of Green/Blue buildings. Gili missed out on the second and third castle scoring (she had one house in the last castle section; none in the second).
Elijah+, Saarya+, Hillel, Nadine
Hillel’s first play. All of them were a little rusty and came to me with rules questions. Even so, they made several mistakes, throwing into question the game’s results. For instance, they played the Vacuum as the one who selects which tokens the other player loses, which is deadly. Elijah and Saarya won on a joint comp/comp.
Jon/Avraham 1025, David/Nadine 875
I opened with a Grand Tichu, which I made, and we both went out first to boot. A 400 point lead. I called and made Tichu again. Then David began to call Grand Tichu and Tichu, and after several rounds, we were only ahead 60 points. I won the last game with a Tichu, and that settled it.
In every hand, David and I had our cards down first; of course, being Avraham’s first play, and Nadine dividing some attention in the first few hands with Cosmic, this was understandable. In nearly every hand, either David or I called Tichu or Grand Tichu; Avraham and Nadine never called it. And in nearly every hand, David and I went out first, leaving Nadine and Avraham to play for third. Too bad David and I weren’t teammates.
David made a Tichu where both Avraham and Nadine had bombs and he didn’t. His Grand Tichu was also helped by getting passed cards to complete both a bomb and an inside eight card straight. I had a single bomb, on the last hand, which I broke up to play a 10 card straight, followed by a three of a kind. I was left with a 9. David eventually played an 8, letting me go out.
Participants: Jon, Nadine, Jonathan, Gili, Yitzchak, Shirley, David K
Gili and Binyamin were absent last week attempting to teach some non-gamers how to play Settlers, apparently without much success.
Jonathan 63, Nadine 62, Yitzchak 61, Gili 58
I set this up, but then moved to another game and Nadine took my place. The scores are really close, as you can see, and this was Jonathan’s first game.
David 116, Jon 68, Shirley 68
Shirley’s first game. I generally don’t like playing this, as it takes too long and is too fiddly. And, when you know you’re losing, you get to know that for a few hours. That’s what happened here. I had a nice second round, but the Provost kept knocking out everything I wanted to do, and David was just miles ahead structurally by mid-game.
At one point, I had the decision to move the provost back up 1 to 3 spaces, but I was only considering the space nearest to the Provost, and what would happen if David moved it back to that spot. I decided that the space didn’t matter enough, but I would let David decide. I missed the fact that he could move it three spaces, knocking out two of mine. It was a 10 point loss for me (no building in the castle, no favor) and a large loss in momentum, too. And it hurt Shirley prettily, too.
It was just a matter of how much he would win by. A lot, as you can see.
Yitzchak 71, Nadine 58, Jonathan 56
Another first game for Jonathan, but he didn’t fare quite as well (though decent enough).
Jon+, David+
We simply cut 60 cards for each player from the stack of remaining unplayed cards, eliminating a few of the duplicates. Without drafting, one doesn’t feel like one has as much to do with one’s own success. In this case, David had the better deck. Building and playing still have a lot to do, but not enough.
I won the first game only because David was stuck at two lands for nearly all of it. And it was still close.
[DK: Well close is an exaggeration. I was holding my own, which was very surprising for only two mana over many many rounds. Jon neglected to mention that my two mana was after a mulligan down to 6 cards since my first draw was mana short. And this was with a 40 card deck with 17 mana.]
The second game wasn’t a walkover for David; I managed to bury three of his creatures. But he had more ways of delivering the pain than I did.
Strategy Gaming in Jerusalem 