Monday 15 December 2014

Khmer and say that

Back to Germany circa 1950, as Martin accepted an invite to join me this evening for a Wir Sind Das Volk! Rematch.
I offered to play West for the first time; this may have given Martin the impression that I had been reading up on strategies. Our experience has been that it is very hard to win as West, but various posts on BGG seem to show the opposite.

In any case, I had one aim and one only - to build up living standards in West Berlin to unfeasibly high levels, and let the sound of clinking champagne glasses and high-living drift over the border and make the socialists furious with jealousy.

Unfortunately, while I was doing that I forgot to make things difficult for Martin in other ways, and he built up a decent economy and started to raise his living standards. Which made my plans redundant. I was able to seed a Western Currency crisis in the last two decades, but by then the damage was done. Martin's socialist ideology had so gripped the nation that it looked like he would win as we unravelled the final decade. I'd spotted this, and my one chance to stop it happening was to force him into insolvency. However, his economy, though decimated by the 70s, wasn't quite on the point of collapse, and so his Socialists triumphed. Even if they hadn't he'd have won by surviving all four decades.

Another good game, though I admit to not having a firm grasp of the full workings of either side. I'm still enjoying it, though every game seems to have a point where I get a stay of execution because Martin makes a wrong move, spots it too late and curses his own idiocy; which is not quite as satisfying as me being actively clever. I liked playing West though, and would like to do so again next time.

(I'll have to add a picture tomorrow as I can't seem to upload to blogger from my iPad).

A full four decades game took about two hours, so it had only just gone 9pm when we finished; Martin couldn't quite be persuaded that it was early enough to play Commmands & Colours, so we got out old friend Aton instead. Two really interesting games, quite unusual - Martin won the first on the insta-win by filling temple one; the second super close, Martin winning by a point after the second scoring round. He scoffed at my attempt to intimidate him with my greens, but I was closer than he realised. Only a shit hand with no fours stopped me making it a very real possibility, which would have made things even more interesting.

Finally we played Khmer - a much closer game than before, starting with a completely symmetrical hand, which Martin won for a 2-0 lead. He won the second hand too, but I won the third, bringing the score to 4-2. In the fourth hand, I correctly deduced that I couldn't win and folded, leaving Martin a single point from victory.

He then folded on the fifth hand, and the scores were 5-3. Interestingly this was the first game in which either of us had folded, and we both called it correctly. By now my brain was melting, and in the sixth game I made a silly error, giving Martin two points for a 7-3 final score.

Great games all, and nice to know that games were being played elsewhere in the GNN-o-sphere at the same time. We are all made of meeples.

3 comments:

  1. " ... because Martin makes a wrong move, spots it too late and curses his own idiocy; which is not quite as satisfying as me being actively clever."

    Still pretty satisfying, though.

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  2. Nah, you definitely had me if it wasn't for the socialists. I wouldn't have been able to clear enough unrest to avoid collapse. More soon please!

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