About time. We finally play this light Knizia game about helping to build the Great Wall of China. There are four groups of victory point chits that people compete for majority presence. On the beginning of your turn, you check for majority in each group of chits. If your card point total is more than everyone else, you can place one the victory point chits onto one of your cards. This adds to your total the negative amount on the chit and it protects the card from being buried by another card. If both victory chits are owned, then players score them, the cards are removed, and new victory chits are revealed. Next, you have two actions. You can either place a group of cards with the same number next to one of the groups. Or you can draw a card. The cards are numbered from 1 to 3 and have special powers. For example, there is the Nobleman which changes every other card to be valued 1. The Dragon can lay over a card and remove it from the game.
All in all, it is a light, simple, and quick game to play — a nice filler to start out a gaming session.
John brought this game out on the table. Another game that we rarely play. Especially with a decent version that is playable on the web. Only Jon and myself had played this game before, so a rules explination was in order. Once we started playing, Jon and myself jumped out into the lead. But it was clear that Jon had the better civilizations. Jon’s declining civilizations were scoring him a lot of points. And everyone left them alone. This, of course, gave him the win.
Vinci can be mean sometimes. Here, Mike hoses John by declaring a truce with him and then surrounding him.
To finish off the night, we played two hands of Mu. On the first hand, we were able to set Adam’s two bid. For the next hand, bidding was fierce. Jon went for a bid of seven. Late into the bidding war, I showed two nines. This was part of the reason why Jon thought he could up it to seven. And we made it by capturing 48 triangles (Jon could have bid it up to 9!). This catapulted me into first and Jon into second.