Antike

Another round of Antike, and this time I tried the Marble strategy. But I must have done sometime wrong, because my economy was not as strong as Marty’s was in the last game. So I was not in the running to win the game. Doug was doing well. Mike was going for cities and he controlled a lot of them, so his economy was snowballing. And Adam warned us that he was going to win on the next move. But both Jon and John, who could do something about it, did not and Mike won the game.

Beowulf – the legend

For the next game, John brought out a new Knizia game, that I own but have not played yet. It has the same mechanics of the Lord of the Rings: the card game. The strategey was not obvious at the start. But we played along and finished the game. On of the “chrome” parts of the game was the retelling of the Beowulf story. We follow a path and each spot on the path has a small section of the Beowulf story associated with it. John would read it to us at each stage. My first impression was not a good one, but I am willing it play it again.

Tichu

Ahh, another game of Tichu to finish out the night. Unfortunately, the game started out bad for us. The luck was clearly with the other team. But when the score was 125 to 475, we set their Tichu call and one/twoed ourselves. This brought us back in the running. But, again, the luck was not with us and we fell back out of the running. Adam was smack-talking me by saying how he was going to destroy me once again. When the score got to be 455 to 945, it was time for a desperation Grand-Tichu. Jon forced my call by picking up the cards. You can see above what kind of hand I had. At least I had a bomb, but what would you pass? Mike got cocky and over Tichued (he had been joking about it earlier). I was in trouble from the beginning. Then Mike played the Dragon. I was tempted to bomb it, but decided to wait. He then played a King high straight with one card left. So I was forced to bomb it. I kept the Ace at the top. And I am left with singles (low ones at that). So I sighed and started working my way down from the top. Surprisingly enough, Mike passed on the Jack and the Eight! I made it!! Even more surprisingly, Jon was able to go out second! This tied us up at 855 to 845. On the next hand, we one-twoed for the win! Woo woo!

Mike seems to have a weakness of overcalling Tichu on GrandTichu and being set.