Saturday 4 January 2014

Elephant Memory

Friday night saw the three of us resume gaming competition following the holiday break. Carrying on with our new 'out of the hat' selection process, Jacquie adopting the role of glamorous assistant drew out Taj Mahal and Trans Europa. We only needed the briefest of rule reminders before playing and felt quite pleased that we didn't make any mistakes the whole time.

The time gap since the last play had been sufficient to prevent any of us remembering any solid strategy although I justified my statement of "quite loving elephants" to take the early goods tiles. James grabbed the plus 2 points special card which he used to great effect whereas Paul fell behind after losing out to some aggressive bidding from me. His time was to come however as the game has this lovely balancing mechanism that means staying in the bidding sees that you collect fewer cards therefore reducing your ability to compete later on.

And so it was, the daunting lead generated by James and myself was clawed back and passed by Paul and his massive fist of bidding cards. When it came to the final visit I was down to two cards. I put one down that would entitle me to place two palaces, nick a few special cards and be the first to take my new cards from the 5 on the table (You score special cards and the colour you have most of at the end) and hope that the guys would contest the resources and lay elephant cards. The planets must have been in alignment because my luck held out and thats what happened. The finest of margins are the difference between final scores in this game as I pipped Paul by 2 points.

And thats how it finished folks.


Chris - 59
Paul - 57
James - 49

We then hastily set up Trans Europa. The game pretends to be a quick light game but it always takes longer than you think. After we each won a round the scores were 7 for James and myself and 9 for Paul. That was how it ended as time ran out. James and I decided that we would rejoice in our shared victory.

Our table looks like so.
Chris-3
James-2
Paul-0.


3 comments:

  1. I admire the out-of-the-hat purity and want to play Taj Mahal again. Good game. We've been getting into The Hive down here - good for kids and adults. Might be worth looking up Chris if you do a lot of two-player.

    Happy New Year Bracknell buds!

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  2. I've read about the Hive but I was worried that it was a bit too chess like/ abstract. May take a look.

    Happy new year Bristol folk.

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  3. It's both abstract and chess-like to be fair, but much shorter. Lovely quality pieces too.

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