Perikles

Wow, Jon suggested that we play Perikles and everyone agreed. Pinch me, I must be dreaming.

I was definitely glad that I got a chance to play this again. But it will probably be my last time with this group. I don’t think others came away with a good impression of it. Doug kept loudly proclaiming that I was in the lead and everyone should get me. However, in the end, Doug won the game and I came in third. Sigh.

Tichu

To finish out the night, we played Tichu. On my failed Tichu call, I knew it was a risk when I called it. And Doug confirmed it when he over Tichued.

Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization

After taking some flak on Rozmiarek’s site about only having a meaty diet when gaming, I was ready to play some lighter weight games tonight. Unfortunately, the other people wanted to play TtA yet again. Mike has declared that this game is in his top 10 game list and that he had to own a copy at all costs. So he bought one copy of this rare game (only 500 were made). He quoted a price of between 100 and 200 dollars for what he paid. I suspected that the location was Gnome, Alaska in that price range.

The actual game has some nicely produced components (the box, the center boards, and the rules) and some poorly produced components (the cards and the player boards). I consider these poorly produced because, although the look nice and colorful, they cannot stand up to repeated game play. My copy is perfectly functional and I will wait until the second edition is printed before purchasing a real copy.

This game has a couple of flaws. First, is that it is played slowly. There is not much that you can do about this. Hopefully, we will get faster as we are more experienced with it. The second is the drawing of cards from the military deck. For the civil deck, you see thirteen cards and can choose from them (paying more action points the farther to the right that the card is located). However, for the military deck, its just a random draw. The problem is that you need a good balance of cards in the different categories from this deck. You want some defensive cards, some tactics cards (to boost your military), and some attack cards.

In this game, I never drew a defense card during the entire game! Gah! Total suckage. I believe that we need a house rule to fix this. Use the same face up setup for civil cards.

Because we only played until the end of the second era, we played with a house rule of you couldn’t use St. Peter’s Basilica with Michelangelo (and also, we discovered, with Joan of Arc).

In our game, Mike was clearly in first and I was clearly in second. Then, much farther back, was Adam and Jon bringing up the rear. I was doing good with keeping an army of three warriors using Legion tactics. The problem was that I had to spend them a couple of times on bidding for colonies. So I had to rebuild them. Unfortunately, my food and ore production was entirely consumed when I did this. So I was riding a thin line. That line broke when Adam first attacked me. He had taken Joan and built up his army enough to jump ahead of me in military strength. I decided to spend my entire army in stopping that attack. And I never was able to recover from that attack. I had missed my chance to take some stronger troops (swordsmen or riflemen). And I didn’t have enough stockpiled food and ore to rebuild.

In this game, when you attack someone, your best bet is to attack the weakest player. That attack will cripple that player. Which makes it much harder to recover and build up your military to become closer in relative military strength. This game definitely proves the old adage of the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

Tichu

After playing TtA, Mike was up for a game of Tichu. And my one-sided run of bad luck continues…

Ed was holding another long game day. So I made cherry hand pies. They were fun to make. But towards the end, I was overwhelmed by the effort each pie took. First I had to mix the ingredients together and stick the bowl in the freezer so that the mixture would harden up. Then , for each pie, I had to:

• Take the bowl out of the freezer.
• Scoop out some of the mixture and weigh it (trying to get similar sized pies).
• Possibly put the bowl back in the freezer if I took too long making the pies
• Flour my hands well and put the scoop of the mixture and form a ball
• Put the ball down and start to roll it out
• At some point, put more flour on the circle of dough
• Stop when it is rolled out 5 inches in diameter
• Scoop out some cherry filling onto circle
• fold half of the circle over top of the cherry filling with a bench scraper
• Crimp the edges with a fork. Remembering to flour the fork because it occasionally sticks
• poke holes in the top for steam
• Pick it up with the scraper and put it on the sheet pan

My only problem with them was that I didn’t let them dry out enough after cooking.

Ed installed a flash for his camera. Its interesting just how much light a camera needs in order to take a picture. For this picture, I used ISO 1600, a shutter speed of 1/30, and a f-stop of 5.6. 1/30th of a second is pushing it at this focal length (28mm). And an ISO of 1600 is pushing it with this camera as well. Sigh. I can’t wait to get an 1D Mark III. Having an extra stop of ISO will certainly help.

Nottingham

John started off us with a new game, Nottingham. This game was billed as a light set collecting game. However, it turned out a be a hose everyone and random play game. There are seven suits of cards. On your turn, you flip over a card. You can either take it or use its power to mess with people. There are cards to seal from people, rob from people, force people to show their hands and take from them, force people to possibly give up cards, or to stop once those painful things from happening to you.

Theres no planning on what cards to collect. Only to hope that you can fulfill one of the set types that score lots of points. Playing those can’t be stopped. Otherwise, you are at the mercy of someone screwing with you. Such fun.

Susan showed us the extremely cute and furry bundle of energy called Riku.

Through the Ages

Marty had wanted to play TtA. So I brought it over. However, he only wanted to play it three player due to time restrictions. Tim joined in.

This game was close! In the end, Marty pipped me by a couple of points. Towards the end, I had a good leader (James Cook) with some territories. So I was scoring well. However, Marty was able to put Iconoclasm into play during the third era (discard all leaders not of the current era). This made me loose Cook and his point generation. Marty was able to play a good leader (Elvis Presley) and able to get his victory point generation up to 16 points a turn.

I knew I had to respond somehow. Fortunately, my army was bigger than his. And, I drew Annex (take a colony), Assassinate (kill a leader), and Spy (take 5 science points). I played Annex first and won. Later, when I was 18 points ahead in military power, I played Assassinate. Unfortunately, I did not bother to sacrifice some units to increase the power. And Marty was able to play 3 six point defense cards to keep his leader. I should have went all out.

Still, it was a fun and close game.

Age of Steam: Western U.S.

To end out the night, I played another meaty game: Age of Steam. We tried a new board as well. The board was interesting. There were two clear choices of starting locations. However, towards the end of the game, everyone was close in points. Apparently, all four corners of the map were decent starting locations. But the western half of the board had a lot of mountains. And building on mountains is costly. That probably hurt Ed and Jon somewhat.

The final scoring was nail-biting. It looked like a close race between me and a new-comer. We were tied in the first calculation. And I turned out to have built more track than he did for the win.