Going underground

After a fallow period, the crop of gamers harvested at this week's games night was rich indeed. But we weren’t playing Agricola tonight, so that’s the end of the farming analogies.

Seven players arrived tonight. But Joe had earlier poo-poohed any thought of Seven Wonders, insisting that as a seven player game, it simply wasn’t that much fun. Instead, we tried something new. Two games played simultaneously on the same table. I was unconvinced, but it was either that or Tsuro for the whole evening, so I agreed.

Three of us – Sam, Adam and Chris (a surprise addition after he arranged his local meetings for Tuesday) – chose Tinners’ Trail. The rest – Joe, Quentin, myself and Jonny (taking a rare break from new parenting duties) chose Pergamon, an exciting recreation of putting on museum exhibitions in 19th century Berlin! The two games chosen had a subterranean theme to them, mining and archaeology respectively.

Since I was mostly occupied with learning a new game, I’ll leave it to one of the others to fill in the details of the Tinner's Trail battle. Meanwhile, Pergamon is a new classic. The rules are simple to understand and the method of distributing money to pay for archaeological digs was very clever. Before long, we were talking like real archaeologists: "That pot’s really old," "Yeah it was a long way underground."

It had a similar feel to Colosseum in that you’re trying to put on a show, and also there’s the comic mix of serious subject matter rendered in a somewhat silly way. It’s also very fast moving, so the twelve rounds flew past. In the end I enjoyed it, despite coming last. Quentin managed to overcome his terrible start by winning lots of money in the last round. This allowed him to polish up his last exhibition and get some extra victory points. Or, as Joe put it, his last-minute buffing gave him a final spurt.

Quentin 23
Joe 22
Jonny 19
Andrew 18

(Sam takes over:) On the other side of the table we were just wrapping up the latest lesson in Winning the Hillmann Way, as Adam methodically took first place in Tinner's Trail by six points. It was an intriguing game with an awful lot of water and very unrewarding prices on copper and tin, except for the first round where clearly there was a worldwide plumbing-and-canning spree. However, because of all the water none of us could really capitalise on it, and lots of grubby Cornishmen were gnashing their teeth as they lost out financially. It was Chris' first game; but he's obviously been reading the blog as his early moves were mainly aimed at forcing the mine-building prices up for Adam and myself as a flurry of early building took place, and we then spent the subsequent rounds dashing our hopes on the rocks of high prices and soggy mine shafts.

Despite my intentions not to, I did my normal Tinner's Trail trick of finding myself with not enough to mine in round four, so I wasn't able to push my way past Adam, who had invested the most early on - and again late on, despite a quiet mid-game period. I do love Tinner's Trail, it's so easy to pick up and has so much variation in it. Final scores:

Adam 89
Sam 83
Chris 53

Then to round off the evening, we all joined together for a couple of rounds of Tsuro. Quentin only stayed for the first, but both were tense affairs in which everybody acted like people with personal space issues in a room that grows ever more crowded, as we tried to avoid each other while not running out of space. Joe was king (or should that be tsar) of Tsuro, placing first both times.

#1
1. Joe
2. Quentin
3. Chris
4= Adam/Andrew
6. Jonny
7. Sam

#2
1= Joe/Andrew
3. Sam
4. Adam
5. Chris
6. Jonny

A very good night was had by all. I enjoyed the two game set-up, because it gave people something else to look at during quiet moments in their game.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	24	99.5	4.14
Andrew	26	97	3.73
Joe	21	92	4.38
Adam	18	90.5	5.02
Quentin	9	40	4.44
Hannah	7	34.5	4.9
Chris	5	20.5	4.1
Steve	4	16	4
Jonny	3	7	2.3

Exciting times on the leaderboard, with Adam falling to fourth in terms of points scored, and his points ratio lead is looking a bit shakey too. Meanwhile, Quentin and Chris climb up a place while I close the gap on Sam. But Joe was the big winner of the evening, mending his points ratio and pushing himself into third. It's any one from four at the top of the table as we enter the last month of the season!