The Old, the New, the Extravurm

Saturday night. While the boys watched Strictly in the other room, the responsible adults munched through a big plate of chilli before setting up the newcomer in the house: Ulm. Ian was intrigued enough to try it again, and Andrew was agreeable.

 it's a church!

As we found on Tuesday, the game plays fairly quickly. As we also found on Tuesday, I'm rather bad at it. Everything happens around the cathedral - draw an action tile from the bag, slide it into the grid and take the three actions you're left with. I decided early on to try and build a hand of cards, and pretty much stuck to that. But the others found that placing seals in the city seemed to be more productive, and Ian sealed the deal using the same city quarter Andy had earlier in the week - scoring points for every quarter of the city he had seals in. Allied to the fact he scored points for placing a seal there in the first place, it was a killer move.

Ian 54
Andrew 48
Sam 44

After that we broke out an old favourite: Tinner's Trail! Andrew set off into an early lead as he capitalised on high copper prices in round one. I set about turning the lizard green, while Ian played a game of few mines. We all snuck a cheap mine at some point, and at the end it couldn't have been closer:

Sam 101
Andrew 100
Ian 92

Industry

I suggested Heckmeck, as I wanted to try out the expansion, Extravurm. It's not a game that really needed an expansion, but I'd been intrigued by it and as it turned out, it was rather fun. Taking two '1's gets you a bratworm, there are two new low-value tiles of 11 and 13, and there are several specialists you can pick up: the canning worm functions as a worm if you don't role any, the weasel gives you a free re-roll, the sitting hen protects your tiles, and there's a golden extra die to claim as well.

The game was one of the longer Heckmecks I've played, but that was mainly due to all of us stealing the 24 off each other. Ian took the honours again, making great use of his weasel.

Ian 13
Sam 10
Andrew 5

Time for another old favourite: 7 Wonders. The evening was starting to get a little blurry at this point so the strategies and tactics are now slightly beyond me, but I recall both Andrew and Ian insisting they'd lost. They hadn't:

Andrew 48
Ian 46
Sam 43

Four games down, three to go. In a flurry of late-night Saturdayness we bashed through three more staples of the GNN diet: Andrew took the spoils on Extreme Biblios after beating me out of the reds on a mere whim of alphabetisation:

Andrew 5
Ian 4
Sam 3

Living it large

Then he made it three wins in a row as he trounced us at Love Letter 3-1-1; before finally finishing with No Thanks. Here Ian and I had an unusual shared victory, with 27 points each to Andrew's 56.  With the hour of 11 now past, we wrapped up a very satisfying weekend's gaming.