Twice in one night?

Uncle Paul loves coming to the Smith household every two weeks. Of course its not the lure of an evening playing boardgames or even the promise of dinner that makes his trips so worthwhile. No, from the moment he steps over the threshold he is immediately tackled by the two Smith children who cling to him, limpet like, insisting that he plays two different types of game at once. Rather like the Lions tour of Australia, these early exchanges serve as a "softening up" tactic so that when the real event occurs they are too worn down to put up much fight. By the time Paul had cleared a whole section of grass with children's scissors he looked done in.

With James sunning himself in Cornwall I had arranged my pile of two player games on the table. In Paul's weakened state he couldn't offer any real resistance to my feigned indifference to playing Agricola. Hurrah!

We elected to have the 7 occupations and minor improvements dealt to us with no options because the task of looking through them all took long enough as it is. Paul was claiming rustiness but we both knew the Smith kids had done their work. To be fair I had had a couple of goes on the new iPad version and therefore strategy was fresher in my mind. Two player Agricola has a nasty side effect of making you think you are good at the game. There's plentiful resources to be had (Especially as I had laid out the 4 extra 3 player cards by mistake) and it becomes an exercise in who can cover every base the best. In relative terms we raced through the game with Paul never coming to terms with feeding his family having neglected to build a cooker that converted animals.

Chris - 54
Paul - 35

Another one of my green tinged photos showing the end board of game 2

Then to my great surprise Paul announced that he would like to play again. Surely we couldn't fit two games in? You betcha! This time we decided to select 7 from 10 of the additional cards. We had spent most of the first game bitching about our useless god given cards. This time we would have to bitch at ourselves. Second time round Paul was right in the swing of it. Fireplace, pastures, ploughed fields, grain, and grazing animals all embedded whilst I was getting all excited by the grocer occupation I had just played which gave me a little tower of about 7 resources that I could buy for one food each.

Piles and piles of resources stacked up, in fact at the end of the game 23 pieces of clay were sitting there unclaimed (Another problem with putting the extra cards down). The game came down to the wire with the difference being that I had taken advantage of my Axe, renovator, conservator combination to upgrade my rooms to stone, whereas Paul had ploughed fields a plenty sitting fallow.

Chris - 42
Paul - 34