Saturday, November 17, 2007

Smorgasbord of games

John showed up first this past Thursday and after a quick bite of pizza we decide to sneak in a quick game of Carcassonne. We stayed fairly close through the game, but about a third of the way through John played his big meeple down for a nice bit of farming and I kept focusing on the city life. Towards the end of the game John had most of his meeples tied up and wasn't getting tiles that would allow him to score immediately. I was able to take advantage of several quick road scores and still had meeples for city placement which allowed me to pull ahead. In the end it was just enough as John's big meeple pulled in 36 points to end up 2 points behind me.

After that Chris, Jim and Colin showed up so we pulled out Through the Desert since we had never played with five people. It was a bit chaotic with nobody playing favorites as the game began Chris and Colin getting cut off from an oasis. Chris got himself a nice area blocked off on one side of the board and I got one on the other side. John did a good job getting to the oases, but failed to ensure he had the maximum number of one caravan. Thankfully I picked up that extra one, which combined with a nice blocked off area gave me the win. Scores were me 67, Jim 55, Chris 52, Colin 46 and John 40.

Chris had brought over my copy of Shadows Over Camelot which we hadn't played for a while so we set it up. We were having some poor luck with how the black cards were coming out with a number of grail cards followed by all of the Saxon cards (which hit Colin since he had gone there to fight them) interspersed with Excalibur cards. Four of us ended up at the grail quest and managed to take it out, but we lost Excalibur. Then the cards for the Lancelot quest came in quick turns and before anyone could get to it, it went down. I failed to pay attention to who the traitor might be and was beginning to think we didn't have one so when people started going for the Dragon quest and it was going to give us 7 white swords against 5 black I thought we had it. Sadly since it had been a while since we played we had all (except the traitorous John) forgotten the fact that an undiscovered traitor turns two white swords black. John ended up winning and the rest of us were miffed (especially Chris who had actually thought John was the traitor).

Then we finished with a game of Citadels. We've taken to playing to only six districts because eight seems to take too long and I've found the game stops being enjoyable at that point. Additionally, we prefer using the Emperor instead of the King and this time we also chose the Wizard instead of the Magician. The Thief and Assassin stayed hidden for several rounds during the game, but when they did appear Jim and I took the brunt (even though that was only being affected one round by each of them). Colin intimidated everyone by starting with a building that cost 6, but was worth 8 at the end. Chris was able to build three 4-point buildings in a row which gave a good foundation. I made the mistake of not taking the Emperor when I needed to leaving Chris (who was on my left) and John (who was to Chris' left) starting the round for most of the game. Which is probably why Chris won - the final scores were Chris 26, John 19, Colin 18, Jim 14 and myself 13.

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