Imperial

Wow, its been a while since I have played Imperial. And, what is surprising, is that three of the people at the game have never played it before! In my opinion, this is the best of the rondel games. You just have to get out of the mindset that your goal is to run a country and win the game.

I was a little worried with how everyone else would play the game. It is hard to bet on countries and then watch as they are mismanaged. But it seems that everyone caught on and did well. I was able to reinvest my money often enough to jump out in the lead. I definitely had the most stocks. But this is not always a good thing. You want a lot of shares in the winning country and the second-most shares in the second-place country. But I was a little too spread out and had shares in every country. I did make one mistake at the end in buying a share in Austria. I should have instead bought another share in England and get a better multiplier (2x versus 1x). Oh well. I still one handily though.

Hansa Teutonica

Big surprise, another game of Hansa Teutonica. This game was different from the start. On both sides of the “gain extra action” building, we placed different cubes. Which I think was a mistake. It takes two different attacks to finally be able to gain control of one of those roads. This is just too costly. If you only have to attack once, then it is not so bad. So no one was able to increase their actions that way in the beginning of the game (until someone finally moved away).

Wayne also was able to gain control of the top road in the game. This meant he was getting points whenever people were “popping” any of the three buildings to improve your abilities. I was behind and saw no way out of it. I needed to increase my color ability before I could place another person in the point building, but that would end the game since Wayne was too close to the game ending condition. Sigh. Still an interesting game though.

Before we could play games tonight, we had to displace the cat. But not before we took pictures of it…

Hansa Teutonica

This is the new hot game. It was discovered late during BGG (on the last day of the con). It is definitely my favorite new Essen game. Unfortunately, it is rather expensive because they had to air-ship it from Essen to BGG.con. This tacks on an extra $12 per game. And I didn’t know about it then so I would have to pay an extra shipping charge to buy it now. So I will wait until the reprint…

I was able to win this game by creating a large network. Unfortunately, I did not have enough action points to end it immediately. So I set up an obvious game ending move and finished my turn. Jeff, ended the game before it got back around to me (which cost me like 12 points). But it didn’t matter since no one was able to catch up to me.

I did notice that Jeff was trying to connect across the board. But I was able to stop him by taking a bottle-neck point. He should have built there first rather than from the other side…

Roll Through The Ages

We ended the night with a light game of Roll Through The Ages…