Mike invited us over for a Deadwood night. It would include a high definition Deadwood showing and board games. One would think the board game selection would be themed like the similiar Rome night. But you would be wrong.

Oh, and do something about that bird’s nest with the poop on the door mat!

Buccaneer

In keeping with the wild west theme, John brought out Buccaneer. This is a pirate game of robbing ships. On your turn, you have two choices. You can either take one of your pirates that is in front of you and place it on top of a pile of one or more pirates that is in front of someone else. Or, if you have a stack of pirates that meets the minimum height requirements for boarding a ship, then you can grab some booty. There will be an item chip that you can collect (if there are two, you choose fist and the person underneath you can have the other one). These item chips are worth many victory points if you have majority. Otherwise, they are worth one point apiece. There is also money that you receive. However, you have to pay off everyone else in the stack that boarded the ship with you. And sometimes this can end up costing you more than you made. Such is the life of the pirate it seems.

This game played rather dull. You have to wait until the begininning of your turn in order to plan a move. And other people’s choices of moves can be surprising. Or at least they can be unexpected.

I had the thought of perhaps keeping a number of enemy pieces out of action by taking a stack that is 1 away from maximum size, capping it with my piece, and then never using it. But usually those stacks already have a couple of your pieces on them so they weren’t candidates for my hosage. Also, a couple of times during the game, it would be possible that the next person had to pass because they were out of pirate tokens. But the previous person would instead board a ship and release some tokens to that player. All in all, rather boring. And People were not livening it up with pirate speak either…

Hacienda

Mike really wanted to play Hacienda. Which kept with the Deadwood theme… not! As is usual with this game, I was the start player. And aparently, John had never been the last player in this game. So he took every opportunity to cause scorings and end the game. Which worked well for him since he was in first. I was just too money starved during this game. Sigh. Can’t score too many points if you can’t afford water holes and haciendas.