9th Nov - Age of Empires III

This week we played an older game (well only 3 years or so, so hardly that old), Age of Empires III. I'd played this before and not liked it at all, but this time it made much more sense and the time flew by, great game (even tho' I lost)

Matt 91, Richard 88, Steve 68, Garry 67

2 Nov - Steam Amazon map

This week we played the Amazon Steam map release this year at Essen. Quite a different mechanism regading the point scored for shipping cubes. It worked quite well but created a scramble for city exits with lots of stubs growing slowly across the board.

Matt 39, Richard 38 (2nd on tie break), Garry 38, Steve 37

26th Oct - Hornet and Mow

Played the first of the Essen games today. Hornet was a bit of an impulse buy just before I left the show. It's OK, but I think it'll need a couple of plays to work out the best strategy.

Matt 2 Hives + 16 Honey, Steve 2+16, Richard 2+15, Garry 1+20, Jo 1+8
(Three hives needed to win)

Matt has written up a nice session report here:
Session report


Then we followed up with a game of Mow which was a right laugh.

Garry 49, Matt 62, Steve 72, Jo 88, Richard 99

24th October - Essen

Just back from 4 great days at Essen Spiel '10

*clicky for big*

I came away with a nice suitcase full of new games, there seemed to be a lot of good games this year, but time will tell. Quite a few games didn't make it to the show, top of my list was German Railways by Queen and this won't be out for another month (this will be on my xmas list now). Also missing was Vinhos the wine game, Key Market only had 900 games delivered which was meant to cover 1000 pre-orders (as you can see I got mine - phew). There were over 650 new games this year so I guess the printers must have been completely overwhelmed.

Regarding production, quite a few of the games I bought were made in China, in the past the quality of Chinese produced games has been woefully poor but they are obviously getting their act together as it's getting much harder to tell the difference.

All I have to do now is start to play them all.

12 Oct - Cuba

We've not played Cuba for a while and all agreed that we should play it more. However it's Essen next week so it'll be competing with a lot of new games.

Richard 71, Garry 67, Matt 60, Steve 53

Then followed up with a game of Escalation, a great little card game by Reiner Knizia.

Matt 44, Garry 52, Steve 55, Richard 67

Fri 8th Oct - Carson City

Sally was out for the night so I decided to have another game night. We played Carson City, one of the best from Essen 2009.

Steve 46, Richard 36, Jo 36, Matt 34, Garry 33

To finish the evening, and continue the theme we played Tenakee.

Garry 64, Jo 59, Steve 58, Matt 55, Richard 47

5th Oct - Hansa Teutonica

Hansa Teutonica this week. I really enjoy this game.

Steve 53, Garry 47, Matt 46, Richard 32

We had some time left so we played Tenakee, a card game I bought at Essen a few years ago and hadn't got round t playing. It's simple stuff but good fun.

Richard 71, Garry 69, Steve 40, Matt 31