Gods and dwarves

An extra Thursday games evening was quickly arranged during the day and four happy gamers found their way to Sam’s home for a supplemental to the usual Tuesday meet – me, Sam, Hannah and Adam. Joe was otherwise engaged, but like a boy with his face pressed against the window of a toy shop, he texted during the evening for the occasional update.

It was an evening of new games, with Sam keen to try a rather attractively designed games Tsuro. This game of path-building across a 6x6 board was was quick and required a certain amount of forward planning, assuming no one crossed your path. The game simply requires the player to stay on the board as long as possible. We were a bit stumped as to what strategy there was, if any at all. Adam came away as the winner, with Sam in second and Hannah and Andrew joint third.

Then we played Ra, a new game for Hannah. But the rules are simple and clear, and even in the first round, we could see her making the sort of astute choices that a seasoned Ra-player would make, including picking up an auction track that contained three gold tiles. Adam used the power of the gods to good effect, and ended the game with lots of buildings. I had a long Nile, but it didn’t flood in the last epoch.

Hannah 40
Adam 38
Sam 33
Andrew 29

We ended on Saboteur, a game of gold mining with dwarves. It’s a fast moving game, and one that raises suspicions of your fellow player at every turn, since some of you are honest dwarves and one is an evil saboteur dwarf (decided randomly by drawing a card). We’d just begun the first round when Hannah asked how she’d know if she was a saboteur. By this we could then deduce she wasn’t, since the card has “Saboteur” written on it in big letters so we started again.

An attempt at a joke by Adam made Sam suspect that he was the saboteur, so he threw down some broken tools in Adam’s way to stop him. Adam replied in kind, trying to stop Sam, thus perfectly recreating the kind of bitter personal dynamics caused by mining for gold. As it turns out, no one at the end of that round was the saboteur! We should all have been friends.

As a game, it was okay. Perhaps it works better with more people and therefore more saboteurs, since if there’s just one (probably) then they’re fairly easy to spot. At the end of the third round, everyone counted up their gold, and Hannah had won again! She had six nuggets, compared to everyone else having five. At this point, there was a most ungallant insistence that Saboteur was non-Leaderboard, just to stop her running away with the season. Otherwise, the points ratio category will begin to resemble the Scottish Premier league, with Hannah being both Rangers and Celtic rolled into one.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	12	54.5	4.54
Adam	10	49.5	4.95
Andrew	12	48.5	4.04
Joe	7	31.5	4.5
Hannah	4	24	6
Steve	2	8	4
Quentin	2	4	2