9th September - 5 player Agricola

Another game of Agricola, this time with 5 players. You probably know all about Agricola by now so I won't go into anymore details about how it works. This was the first time I'd played with 5 players and the first thing I noticed was how difficult it was to get the resources you wanted as there was so much demand for them. In fact at the beginning of the game I don't think I saw anything stay on the board until the next round.

The game was noticeable for two things, first Aga managed to fill all the spaces on her farm, despite resources being hard to acquire. But strangest of all was Steve's winning farm, he ended the game with 8 stone huts, 5 family members, a sheep, a boar and a stable. Due to the cards he had which enabled him to build huts cheaply he just focused on that. Despite all the minus point for missing items it was still a decisive victory.

Steve's 8 stone hut farm

Steve 35, Richard 32, Aga 31, Garry 30, Neil 28

26th August - Stone Age

This is the 2nd playing of Stone Age for us, the first time I didn't have the time to write much about it as I was really busy with work, I'm still busy but I'll try and write more than a few sentences.

Stone age is a worker placement game, each player starts with 5 meeples and can send them out to gather resources (food, wood, clay, stone & gold) or stay in the village area to farm, make tools or have babies. Victory points are gained for building huts with the resources that you've gathered or you can buy cards which will give you various items straight away (resources, tools, VPs etc) and also bonus paoits at the end of the game. These cards are not to be overlooked as it is possible to score a lot of points with them.

When you've sent you meeple out to gather resourses the amount you bring home is govened by the roll of the dice. You roll 1 dice for each man, so, if you have 4 men in the woods you roll 4 dice, total them up and divide by 3 (which is the value of wood), with gold you divide by 6. As you can see getting gold is a lot harder that wood. You can improve you die rolls but getting some tools and adding their value once you've thrown the dice, thus increasing your chances of getting what you're after.

Obviously with the dice makes things a bit random, but the tools will give you a bit of help if you need it. The huts can come up in a random order just like the cards, but overall the game works really well. It's not a heavyweight gamer's game but it never claims to be, it is however good fun and it's really nice to look at as well.

The first time we played we didn't realise quite how much the cards added to your score at the end of the game, this time around things were a bit different (tho' I still lost).

Jo 178, Steve 167, Richard 147, Garry 131

I've since played this twice with Sally, this is quite rare as she dosn't normally like playing games much, either finding them either a bit too simple and boring or complicated and dull. Stone Age seems to have hit the sweet spot (I'll see if she fancies Agricola next week!)