It must be an episode of the Twilight Zone. Because I played the same games in the same order. Weird, huh? Double or nothing did give me double the same feeling as yesterday.
Another game of Khronos was played because we wanted to see if this game is worth it or not. Plus, the rules were fresh on our minds. For both games, we played with the variant of putting three face up cards to choose from. This is a small step in the direction of being able to choose your strategy effectively. But this game really needs a bigger hand size! In the last game, the three face up cards quickly filled up with one color and stagnated. But in this game, I noticed that different people were going for different colors. So there were cycles in what was available. I was lucky that Tim was going after purple (which I was not). Tim would grab the purple cards and replace them with orange. Which I then grabbed and put back purple. This helps if the person before you is going for a different color if you are. But it hurts if the person upstream from you is going for the same color that you want (which was Mike in this game).
I made a bad initial first move by placing a size 1 orange building on one blue and a size 2 orange building on another blue that was next to the first. I had originally planned to join them for my next move. But Jon took advantage of me by placing a size 2 orange building on the sized 1’s domain. Now I cannot join them because the best I can do is tie in strengths. And in this game ties are bad for the initiator. So, I postponed and upgraded the 2 building to a 4.
And a little bit later on, I was also in a battle with Mike. I now have two orange battles to fight (not a good situation to be in). Fortunately, I was able to tie Mike in strength and Mike was unable to attack either of my two groups. But then the pain started!
Now it is Jon’s turn and he is seriously considering joining Mike and my domains of equal strength and choosing the winner. Instead of fighting a battle that helps him elsewhere. He is not in either side of this battle. But he thinks that he has nothing better to do than to cause chaos and hope it maybe clears out the board and that eventually helps him out. So I sit there dreading Jon’s move. Because if he does that, then I am effectively out of the game. And, as if that was not bad enough, Mary is considering the same thing!! She is fighting Tim elsewhere but she is still tempted to resolve Mike’s and my battle.
Ugh! Such a painful part of that game for me. Fortunately, nothing happened and I was able to reduce Mike. Which put him out of the game. But at least the killing stoke was from the opponent and not from Joe Random Person. This variant seems to favor large buildings. And it is hard to get back into the fight when my domain covers most of the board.
At the end of the game, I never moved either of my two travelers. I only scored in the first board (“Age of Might”). But the second scoring netted me an impressive 34 points.