For me, this week's game night was a really good mix of new stuff combined with some of the games I'm most interested in right now.

It all started for me with what I'd call an "old standby", finally getting to play Race for the Galaxy for the first time in a while (like 3-4 months).  And despite the fact that I picked it up back in November, it was the first time I've played with the Gathering Storm expansion.  Anyway, I lucked into getting the Trade League and two other trade power cards in my opening hand, so I tried to trade myself into a production/consumption engine using both the Galactic Genome Project and the Tourist World to generate 12+ VP's every other turn.  I was a bit rusty, playing "heads down" for most of the game, and unfortunately Chip managed to out-"race" me with a crazy military buiildup, dropping his 12th card on the turn before I could have taken the lead for good.  As it was, he beat me by 5 (52 to 47, and I would have been able to get 12-14 more points with Consume x2 on the next turn).  Alton and Brett were playing with us, but were a little behind the curve at 36 and 38 points each.  Still, I'd say that I did pretty well for having taken so much time off from this great card game.


Our foursome stayed together as we pulled out this month's Game of the Month!, Thebes.  It's hard to really recount how a game of Thebes plays out, but in general there was lots of shuffling around Europe followed by lots of frustrated digging in the sand.  Again, Chip and I managed to get a significant lead over Brett and Alton, and heading into the last few weeks, I was pretty sure that I had managed to pull out the win.  In his last few moments, however, Chip made a last-ditch dig giving him just three measely little tiles.  As fate would have it, even through the sea of useless dirt swimming around the site, he pulled the 7 and 5 tokens (along with just one dirt tile) from the appropriate bag and again pulled ahead of me, this time by a mere 4 points (58 to 54, with Alton and Brett getting 34 and 37 points, respectively).  

I like Thebes a lot, but you've really got to go in knowing that such wild swings of luck are possible.  As Chip put it while we were putting the game away, Thebes is all about maximizing and managing your luck (although I'm sure that he worded it much more elegantly).  To do well, you have to put yourself in situations where you have the greatest chance to score, and then turn yourself over to the winds of fate as you reach into the bags o' randomosity.  If anything really bothers me about the game, it'd have to be that it always seems to go on just a bit too long for what it is.  The randomness itself isn't so bad, but when you invest an hour or more in a game, it kind of sucks to have a random pull in the last 5 minutes of the game decide the winner.  Not that I'm bitter or anything (grrrr!), but if the game were only 30 minutes long, for instance, I wouldn't mind at all.

Going from one Queen game to another,  Chicago Express next hit the table.  James replaced Brett as the fourth player, so all of us had at least one play under our belts.  And just to be completely up front about this game, I have absolutely no idea how to play it.  I mean, I know what kind of things are important and "in general" I think that I understand what you need to do to win, but I clearly suck major root in actually getting those types of things done.  For instance, in this game, two railroads reached Chicago: the PRR and the NYC.  Of course, I was the player shut out of the PRR (since it only has 3 shares), and while I did share the wealth of the NYC, another player had doubled up on it so he (James, the eventual winner) benefitted far more than I.  I thought that I was making sound decisions throughout the game, but in the end I finished in last place, $25 behind the winner.  I don't know if it's my lack of experience with stock games like this, or if I just can't yet get my brain around the wide-open yet obtuse nature of Chicago Express.  No matter what my issues are, however, I continue to have a great time playing miserably.  As opposed to Thebes, this game seems to pack so much hardcore gaming into less than an hour, and it always leaves me wanting more.  

Continuing to push the game selection a bit, I then offered up Metropolys for us to play.  I had looked at this game and downloaded its rules back when it first came out, and I thought that it sounded pretty interesting.  But when Scott Nicholson listed it as one of his top 10 surprises for 2008, I pulled the trigger and bought it.  Since I hadn't played before either, the rules explanation was a little fumbly, but they were simple enough that we went straight to the "Expert" game and still had a good idea of how it would run before we even got started.  Alton made some early moves to get three of his highest level buildings into three different districts, giving him an early lead on the tallest buildings.  I managed to pick up a few of my preferred neighborhoods (parks) early on, and was trying to find a way to build next to a few statues, since that was my secret objective card.  In the end, however, I was able to exploit a few dead-end neighborhoods and a few other players' lack of high-numbered buildings to win rather comfortably.

Overall, Metropolys was rather well reveived.  Personally, the idea of combining a bidding/auction mechanic with a spatial component is just really cool.  And even with some serious analysis paralysis in the early game (when people still didn't know exactly what to do), it only took us 36 minutes to play the whole game.  If people will give it a chance, I could see this becoming one of our favorite fillers.

And then we finished off the night for a second week with a game of Glory to Rome.  We had two new players (James and "Fuzzy" Chris Wickline), so we once again played without building powers.  Seeing how getting a Craftsman client pretty much won me the game last week, Alton and Chip engineered things perfectly to make sure that there was but one opportunity to repeat this play, and that they were the only ones to benefit from it.  The difference in vault points and merchant bonuses decided the margin of victory, as Alton pulled out the win, scoring 3 points more that Chip, but 10+ more than Chris, James, or me.  


For right now, I'm still really excited about Glory to Rome.  Without the building powers, however, the craftsman does appear to be decidedly unbalanced in its power.  The game is a lot of fun and offers tons of choices to make about how you will play it, and I can't wait to see how the "full game" works out.  

While that pretty much wraps up my gaming for this week, I did want to mention a strange little phenomenon taking place regularly at the Hypermind BoardGamers.  There is an obsessed group of gamers which seem to be infatuated with the game Lord of the Fries.  Now, I have somehow missed the boat on this game altogether, but see it being played all the time, either starting before I arrive or while I'm involved in another game.  It looks and sounds more than a little bit silly, but people always seem to have a great time with it, and they rate it incredibly well.  So please, somebody tell me what is the deal with this game???