Happiness Park

Andrew and I sat down for a little extra-curricular gaming this evening with me eager to get back in the saddle after a week out of commission. I'd been so out of it I couldn't even play Fuji Flush with the boys for four days, so it was nice to have the energy to tackle a nice fast-moving euro, which is what we began with in Santa Maria. This has the generic theme of developing newly discovered (by Europeans (®Timeline)) lands, and building on them. Possibly the only really unusual thing is that victory points are actually happiness points, as shown by the rictus grin on the points.

The gears and wheels are the buildings, which you activate to get stuff. The activation itself is simple - a coin to activate a single building, a blue die to activate a row of them, or one of the communal white dice to activate a column of them. Or build more buildings. The game plays over three years and despite the rather bland appearance speeds rather nicely - like a cross between Barenpark (the buildings need to fit onto your board) and something more point-salady. Although it's not a Feld-esque salad - Stan had previously beaten me despite only building two buildings the whole game, whereas I expanded to seven. And I took a similarly constructional mind this evening, albeit having the advantage over Andrew on his first play:

Sam 60
Andrew 43

Santa Maria only took an hour, so we returned to our current favourite: Rajas of the Ganges. Andrew wanted to find out where we went wrong against Adam. I suggested that it was probably inviting him, as I didn't see us about to crack open the mystery of Rajas in the way Adam had any time soon.

But if there was a mystery, Andrew is closer to discovering it than I am. I went for a big glory scoring route, pushing myself around the board post-haste as Andrew generated a lot of cash at the other end of the board. But I found that I had to keep building up to my big moves, whereas Andrew's engine was ticking over at a faster rate, generating cash to the point where he suddenly began scoring glory too, and caught me up. My cash and glory markers weren't even in spitting distance when he ended it:

Andrew: wins
Sam: doesn't

And we rounded off the night with a blast from the past in Take it Easy. And a blast from the past in Andrew calling Things From the 70's. It was an utterly brutal round, with loads of '1' tiles coming out and both of us cursing our damned luck. I went for classical writers in an attempt to woo the tiles, and it partly worked: we scored more in the second round, but not enough to make our overall points anything but vaguely respectable:

Sam 291
Andrew 189

And with that, Andrew was gone, into the night. Thanks mate!