Cities and Guilds

Ed and Susan are back after a long hiatus of not gaming at my house. And they brought a new game with them called Cities and Guilds. This is a tile-laying majority game. There are two kinds of majorities that you are fighting over, the most influence in one of four guilds and the most controlled buildings in a block. Tiles are placed on the board orthagonally adjacent to another tile. However, you can cross a street and still satisfy the adjacency condition. There are three types of tiles that you can place: buildings that you can place a pawn on along with bumping influence in the corresponding guild (or skip the influence and place two pawns), markets where you place no pawn but get two influence points (they also contribute to scoring), and pubs which only contribute to scoring.

Scoring is overly complex and fiddly in this game. And I pretty much ignored it and concentrated on gaining majorities. I concentrated in two guilds and three blocks. Susan surprised me with the adjacent placing and jumped into one of my initial blocks and also placed two pawns to grab the lead. Ties in the number of controlled buildings are broken by number of pawns. And you must exceed the current number of buildings in order to win back the first place ranking. So, I responded by battling back controll with Susan. Fortunately for me, Susan momentarily focused elsewhere which allowed me to finally gain first place again. Ed missed completing a block so I took advantage of that by closing it my self. This allows you to place a special building anywhere you like. So I placed it in one of my blocks.

When I placed the last of those buildings (there are only four) later on in the game, I noticed a problem. I placed it in one of my controlled blocks but it now only had two spots left. Susan noticed that she could place a building there with two of her pawns on it. This would tie in number of buildings and the number of pawns would break the tie in her favor. She had quite a maniacal and evil laugh at that point! I was hoping that she wouldn’t notice that move… Ed of course closed out the block to score a couple of points.

This was an interesting game and one I would play again.

Stephenson’s Rocket

Adam brought out this old Knizia title. It was one that I have not played in a long while. There are just too many new games coming out… And early on it was clear that Adam was in the lead and Ed and I were fighting for second. So when we both tied it was amusing.

Fjords

While Adam waited for his ride home to arrive we played this two player game. It has some aspects of Carcassonne and some aspects of Go to it. I like playing it. The first game was a tie. In the second game, we both had placed all of our farm houses on the board. So we were deperately trying to grow areas that we controlled. And I was able to end up with a bigger final area than Adam for the win.

Adam did have one amusing quote during the game: “This tile is more landy”. I am sure that it is a technical term…

There seems to be a lot of pretzel snacks left for everyone. Too bad I don’t like pretzels…