Tuesday Night Triple Play

I was able to sneak out for some gaming on Tuesday night and had a real good time playing a wide variety of games.

First up The Other Half and I ran some arrends to the doctors and the kitchen counter stores and got some samples. About three or so I made it to Steve/Rob's and started cooking up some chili.

Once that was started, Steve, Susanne, and I played the new expansion for Agricola, Farmers on the Moors. Moors added in some really nice items, taking an already pleasantly complex board game and cranking it up a notch. I really liked the concept of the fuel and how the executed. It provided motivation for conversion from a wood house early, to help pay for future fuel expenditures. Steve took an early lead using his wood hoarding techniques to build a five room house early, but fell into trouble with his massive birthing campaign and had to take a begging card. In the second to last round, I took both birth tiles that allowed me to push ahead of Steve and the actions needed to replace my wood house directly to stone with the conservator. I give the expansion a pretty high rating for the new stuff it adds to the game.

Second game was the next race in the Grand Prix League. We had three new teams show and a return of three teams for a total of six racers on the field. We raced on the Zhuai track that really limited the 6th gear action. I'll post a complete update in a new posting with all the action an current standings in a blatant attempt to get my blog post count up for the month.

The last game was again Steve, Susanne, and myself. I had opened up Dominion as it will be my next unboxing, but I wanted to at least play the game once so I could talk to it more intelligently during the video. I really liked the game and I can see that it will have a high degree of replayability. The player interaction is not high, in fact it can be pretty random given the cards that come up for the kingdom cards, which are chosen at random prior to the game. Once everyone knows the rules, it actually moves along very quickly. Each game will have a slightly different strategy, based upon the cards that are chosen again, but some key things we noticed was that concentrating solely on victory points (VP), which you need to win, diluted your ability to conduct actions, which you need to get VP. Also, concentrating to much on money development at the experience of actions or VP, and not making the switch to a VP build soon enough, put you in a hole when end game was approaching.

Solid night of gaming, with three very different game styles, all good stuff. Thanks for Steve for hosting on such an odd night and for Suzanne for the corn bread muffins.

jp

Games x3 & yummy, yummy chili