Since John is only working six days during the month of October, he decided to hold a day gaming session. We started out with this wooden abstract three player game. Your goal is to build the longest path by dropping logs to form a triangle. John managed to tie me for longest path, but my 2nd longest path was bigger than his. Which gave me the win.
Our next game was the English version of Chinesische Mauer. The artwork is not as good as the German one. In the middle of the game I was in a two way fight with both John and Gina. Not a good position to be in. But somehow I managed to eek out a win.
Ahh, the new meaty game that just came out. Certain members of the cult-of-the-new were lusting after playing this. So I was happy when Susan brought it out. This is a game where you want to be as efficient as possible. And when the game is over, you beat yourself up over the wasted inefficiencies. However, for some reason, the rules and game play did not blow me away in my first playing of it. Who knows what this game is lacking. But I’ll give it another chance.
Another playing of this lighter Knizia game. I still haven’t won it or even come close to winning it. But I don’t mind playing it. It is kind of random what cards you draw and what buildings other people go after. So I don’t think there is much long term strategy to this game. Only tactical playing based on what cards you hold now. There is an end-game problem though. During my two playings of it, when it came close to the end of the game, one person set another person up to win the game. I don’t think that they realized it at the time of the playing, or maybe they just didn’t care. But it would be interesting to see how it would play out if everyone knew just what moves other people needed for the win.
To finish off our game day, Susan brought out this older game. The only difference between the German version and the English is the little plastice wine bottles that mark player colors. They didn’t bother to change the name (umlauts anyone), the decimal point (a comma versus a period), or the currency (Euros versus Dollars). In this game, I knew I was hosed from the start. I did not have a good selection of wine bottles that I could use in future auctions and I didn’t have any good matching bottles. The sad thing is that there is not much you can do to alter your situation.