Elfenland

We had six people tonight, which is a hard number. Do you play a six player game or break up into two 3 player games (ignore other useless combinations, please)? It had been a while since we went with six. Elfenland was brought out onto the table and we all agreed. I view this game as rather dry and boring since I just view it as a travelling salesman problem with spurts of player-screwage, dealing with the bad cards that were dealt to you, and living with the poor set of tiles to choose from. But, it had been a while, so I acquiesced to the groups wishes.

I started out all right. But, during turn four, I was near Marty, who was obviously in the lead. And the difficulty chips came out on Marty’s likely path. Which happened to surround me. Sigh. It didn’t help that I recieved bad cards and unhelpful tile placements.

Traumfabrik

Mike left early. With five people, the game choices increase. And Traumfabrik was brought out. I like this Knizia gem and happily played it. I really should get off my ass sometime and print out the paste ups for this game. I like playing with the English language movies and studios rather than their German equivalent. Marty was trying to deduce the English language film names during the game and I didn’t help him much by substituting monkeys in the title (like Gentlemen Prefer Blonde Monkeys).

With so many Grimms and one Ashley-Rollman in the game, this game took a while to play. I didn’t mind the wait so much for the bidding because that is the core to the game and you need to be thoughtful about it. However, what I did mind was the agonizing waits over tile selection in the party. Mike would choose first. But before he did that, he would slowly look at each person’s movie and figure out what they would need. And then go around the table again for good measure. So, I was in no mood to do that same thing at the end of the game for the final party. Yes. I could take my time, figure out what people’s scores would be if they could choose tiles, and hose them. But that just destroys the mood of the game. This should be a nice, fun social experience and not a long drawn out calculating process.

I quickly went for the actor that I needed to finish my movie and get me some points. Yes, I should have taken the agent since it had another star and also was a wildcard. But I wanted the game to be over quickly. Mike was happy to take the agent and apparently this gave him the lead in the final scoring. I could live with that. However during the clean up of the game, I got to hear from multiple people many times of that fact. Yes, I realize that. Even after the third time you told me. Sigh. It was more painfull than the calculation. So the next time I will try and figure out what everyone needs and how to hose them.

Or, I could just play Nicht die Bohne!