Stuff and Nonsense

What's fast becoming 'the usual' crowd last night, comprising Adam, Andrew, me, Quent and Sam.

Sam was going to be arriving late, so we needed something for four that wouldn't take ages. Ingenious caught Adam's eye, Reiner Knitzia's crowd-pleasing abstract. It is very simple, with a clever scoring trick that is similar I think to Tigris and Euphrates (also by RK), in that although you are advancing multiple tracks, your final score will be determined by your least advanced one. So it's imperative that you try to push each of the six tracks evenly. This becomes harder to do as the board fills up, and your opponents cap off big point-scoring chains. Everyone grasped it quickly, and although it looked like I was winning, my trailing yellow track proved my undoing, Adam winning by a couple of points. Quent and I came joint second, Andrew third. It's a great two-player game, not totally sure about the four-player . . .

Next up was 7 Wonders for five, Sam having joined us by then. It was the usual fast-paced stuff, and it is in fact during the scoring round that everybody sits up and takes notice of each other's achievements, the majority of the game being played in relative silence. Adam romped in to first with a cracking 63 points, Sam in second with 49. Quent came third, me fourth and Andrew fifth. It's the second game in a row I've played where several turns have felt like there's nothing useful to do — several identical cards meaning you can't even deny your neighbour something helpful. I think the key to combatting those lulls is to hold off building your wonder stages until there's really nothing better to do with the cards in your hand.

I played the Colossus of Rhodes (B), which only has two stages to build, so perhaps that's a consideration. Or perhaps I'm just rubbish. Anyway it was fun; as I remarked at the time, rather than giving me the flavour of a big civ game in a fraction of the time, I find it gives me a bit of a yearning for one. But perhaps that's a symptom of a couple of weeks playing a few short games rather than one big chewy one. Republic of Rome next time then? Or Die Macher?
We rounded out the night with No Thanks, and Quent trounced us all despite (or maybe because of) being the only neophyte.

[edit]Hello - Andrew here. Despite Joe's peculiar belief that having a leaderboard increases a games club's mortality rate, here's this weeks update. I've decided to use Quentin's method, hereby known as The Q System.

	Played	Points
Adam	4	22
Quentin	5	20
Joe	5	18
Andrew	5	16
Sam	2	10.5
Hannah	1	5