We had another great game night this week with about 15 people participating.  In fact, at 10:30 or a little after, there were still 11 of us looking to start a new game!  But enough of this inane chatter; on with the games!

Diamant

When I arrived, a couple of tables were about to finish up while several more of us were looking for something to do.  Rather than dive into something long and drawn-out, a lot of us jumped into a couple of games of Diamant.  Michelle ran away with the first one by getting lucky with a 15-gem card when she was the only one left, while Beth squeaked by in the second, just edging out Joe.  I did pretty horribly in both, pulling out too early several times in the first game and then getting caught every time in the second.

Time: 16 and 11 minutes
Game 1: Michelle* 36, Beth* 23, Ken* 21, Chip 19, Me 11, Charles* 6, Joe* 6
Game 2: Beth 24, Joe 23, Charles 20, Ken 18, Chip 7, Michelle 0, Me 0
Ratings: Beth 9, Michelle 7, Ken 7.5, Joe 7, Chip 7.5, Charles 6.5, Me 6

Diamant is pretty fun every once in a while, but it wears out its welcome for me pretty quick. 

Through the Desert

Through the Desert is the new Game of the Month! for April, so it was my next game of the evening.  Both Beth and Joe were new, so I got to explain a game that I haven't actually played in almost a year.  I think I did okay, and then we got down to bid'ness.  I pushed hard to wall off a section of the board early on, and did so at the cost of making one or two of my other caravans pretty useless for the rest of the game.  Kenny had one corner almost to himself (due partly to the fact that it was near one of my ignored caravans), and was two turns away from claiming a huge section of it when Chip thankfully used the last two pink camels to end the game.  Kenny still came out on top, but the spread was only 8 points from top to bottom.

Time: 26 minutes
Score: Ken 56, Joe* 53, Me 52, Chip 50, Beth* 48
Ratings: Ken 8, Joe 8, Me 7.5, Chip 8, Beth 8

Through the Desert was one of my first real "euro" games (and my first Knizia, IIRC), and I have a lot of love for it.  It's certainly quick and easy to play, and games tend to be close (as was this one).  The first concern that I have about it, however, is the really high chaos factor, because you just can't track and account for what everyone else is going to do and how it will affect your 4 or 5 caravans.  So to some extent, you've got the choice to either ignore a couple of your caravans (as I did) or to dive into the depths of profound analysis paralysis each time you need to place your two camels. 

And the other thing that I still haven't figured out is whether there is any real strategic element to the game.  It's clearly a very tactical game, but I've always held on to the idea that you can also go into the game with a plan ahead of time, and the more I play, I'm just not sure whether that's possible.  But anyway, I look forward to this month and getting the chance to find out the answers to these questions and decide whether TtD will rise nearer the top my ratings or fade back into the masses of all the 'pretty good' games of my collection.   

Pandemic

In my quest to get to 100 plays of Pandemic, I'm always looking for a chance to get it to the table. So when Joe mentioned it, we had a game ready to go in minutes using the Virulent Strain challenge and 5 epidemics.  There were five of us playing, and our roles included the Troubleshooter (Joe), Researcher (Beth), Containment Specialist (Chip), Generalist (Kenny), and Archivist (me).

For our first epidemic, a yellow city was revealed and yellow became the virulent strain.  We were pretty lucky with player cards early in the game, and I drew into the black cure with just a little assistance from Beth.  But as a pretty experienced group, we were very focused on trading cards and curing the diseases the whole game long.  That also meant that the board was looking pretty precarious at times, especially as we were getting ready to cure the last disease.  Thankfully, we drew the special event that lets you change roles, and Kenny became the Medic for the last turn or two, just walking through areas to calm them down and buying us time to win the game.

Time: 40 minutes
Score: Humans (Joe, Beth, Chip, Ken & Me) - Win; Pandemic - Lose
Ratings: Joe 9, Beth 8.5, Chip 9, Ken 9, Me 10

I've only got 15 more to go!  But I definitely think that we need to step up the difficulty with our group now.  The next time I play, I'm going to suggest 6 "vanilla" epidemics (no expansion challanges) to see how we do.  'Cause we really need to lose sometimes.  Of course, the other option is to finally try out the Bio-Terrorist role and beat up on the other players myself...

Macao

Macao is probably the "new" game that I'm most excited about these days, so I was also very happy to get the chance to play it again this week.  Charles was completely new to it, so I got another chance to practice my rules teach, and I think that I've finally internalized it enough now to make it pretty smooth. 

But anyway, things didn't fall into place for me quite as well this time as they did in my last play.  The best thing that happened early on was picking up the Jade Storage card, which doubled all my points for delivering Jade.  And since all of the jade was on 4-cube city quarters, no one invested the resources to stop me from picking up all three of them (which totalled 20 points of my final score).  But I also had to get two -3 point markers throughout the game, one for having to discard a card and the other for leaving one card on my tableau at the end.  Still, I picked up a few end-game scoring cards as well, had a decent sized city presence, and made a few other deliveries to rack up 75 points and the win.

Charles did a great job (especially for a newbie) in putting together some cool cobos of cards.  In particular, he picked up the card that let him buy more than one quarter in a turn and the Statue, which gives an addition 3VP for each dark-colored space (where the wild tiles are located) that you claim.  I made sure that I didn't let him get the ones that reduced the price of the quarters or gave an additional 1VP for each quarter that you claim, though, or he would have been a juggernaut.  His only weakness was that he didn't work on delivering many goods at all (despiting having a ton of them), and that cost him some points that could have challenged me for the victory.

Time: 115 minutes
Score: Me 75, Charles* 59, Ken 47, Beth 44
Ratings: Me 8.5, Charles 7.5, Ken 8, Beth 7


An veritable explosion of douche-baggery, as we all take stuff that each other wants...
I made a comparison between Macao and Agricola last time I played, and I definitely feel that it is continuing to hold true.  You've got this huge set of cards to deal with and build some sort of strategy, and while there are a lot of ways to score points in the game, you really have to be pretty general in touching on all of them to some extent in order to do well.  I mean, you can certainly focus more on one area than the others, but going all-out on one would be very hard to do unles you got the exact cards you needed. 

But I definitely like the theme and what you're "doing" in Macao better than I do Agricola.  I'm just not sure that the game itself is as good overall than the 'Gric.  I definitely plan on taking the time to figure it out, though.



Shadows Over Camelot

We thought that we had 7 people looking for a game, so I recommended Shadows Over Camelot as our closer for the evening.  In the end, though, there were only five of us who played the whole game, and two of them were new.  I considered now including the traitor at all, but at least one of the new players practically demanded that they be included.  So instead, I had us play through 3 turns each without a traitor to see how things worked and give a little head start to the loyal knights, and then we handed out the loyalty cards. 

We started strong, winning a Black Knight and Pict quest, and I picked up Lancelot's armor as well.  I hated it, but Joe (one of the newbies) drew the traitor and made it pretty obvious waaaaay too early, so he got called out and that gave us another white sword.  Seige engines were getting out of hand by then, so all of us headed back to Camelot and beat them back for a couple of rounds.  Most of us then went to the Grail and completed it as well along with the Heroism card for another 4 white swords to put us up to 8 total white swords.  We then mainly just continued to fight off seige engines while waiting for a few more of the quests to be lost, just so that the round table would fill up and let us win.


Time: 59 minutes
Score: Loyal Knights (Ken, Beth, Charles*, Meolody* & Me) - Win; The Forces of Darkness and Traitor (Joe*) - Lose
Ratings: Ken 7.5, Beth 10, Charles 7.5, Melody 7, Me 8, Joe 4.5

I had fun, but I also lowered my rating from the 9 that Shadows has held for the longest time down to an 8.  It just seems like I win too many games by waiting for quests to fail, and that just feels too clunky.  It didn't help that Joe was new and got the traitor card, and not knowing how to play that role really destroyed his opinion of the game.  And like I've said before, while I think that Shadows still does a great job of fostering real cooperation and tension (especially over the traitor), newer and more efficient co-op games have probably made it seem a bit dated at this point.  One more "bad" experience may push it even lower for me...

So stay tuned, because I hope that Descent will make another appearance next week!

Other Games Played

Carcassonne
Time: 34 minutes
Score: Joe* 52, Mark 39, Michelle 36, Alton 35, Melody 34
Ratings: Joe 8.5, Mark 8.5, Michelle 9, Alton 9, Melody 8.5

Dixit
Time: 33 minutes
Score: Michelle* 40, Chris 34, Keith* 32, Graham 30
Ratings: Michelle 8, Chris 8.5, Keith 7, Graham 7

No Thanks!
Time: 39 minutes (for 4 hands)
Score: Chris 142, Graham 160, Keith 230, Chip 234
Ratings: Chris 7.5, Graham 8, Keith 8, Chip 7.5

Patrician
Time: ?
Score: Michelle* 39, Melody* 33, Alton 28, Joe* 26, Chip 24
Ratings: Michelle 8.5, Melody 9.5, Alton 8.5, Joe 8, Chip 8

Race for the Galaxy
Time: ?
Score: Alton - 3 wins, Charles and Mark - 0 wins
Ratings: Alton, Charles, and Mark - all 10's

Small World (on Graham's iPad!!!)
Time: 20 minutes
Score: Chris 105, Graham 69
Ratings: Chris 9, Graham 8

Stone Age    
Time: 90 minutes
Score: Charles* 321, Beth 232, Tim* 207
Ratings: Charles 8.5, Beth 9, Tim 8

Through the Desert
Time: 29 minutes
Score: Alton 66, Keith* 59, Chris 56, Graham* 54, Mark 54
Ratings: Alton 8.5, Keith 7, Chris 9, Graham 8.5, Mark 8.5

Tobago
Time: 54 minutes
Score: Keith* 43, Graham* 41, Chris 30
Ratings: Keith 7, Graham 8.5, Chris 8.5

Toledo
Time: 35 minutes
Score: Chip 18, Alton 16, Keith* 10
Ratings: Chip 9, Alton 9.5, Keith 8

Unspeakable Words
Time: 15 minutes
Score: Graham 100, Keith 86, Mark 74, Chris 69, Alton 80 and Nuts
Ratings: Graham 7.5, Keith 7.5, Mark 8, Chris 7.5, Alton 8

Zombie Fluxx
Time: 24 ans ?minutes
Game 1: Zombies WIN, Players (Melody, Michelle, Alton & Joe) - ALL LOSE
Game 2:  Alton - Win; Melody, Michelle, Joe & David - Lose
Ratings: Melody 9.5, Michelle 9, Alton 8.5, Joe 8, David 4

* First play for that Person


Keith made some freakin' cool card sculptures and showed them off this week. Ain't they cool?