5th April - Agricola

I'm still off sick and Matt was away and Ben was working, so only Steve and Richard, here's Richards report:


I decided we should play 2 player Agriocola using the Interactive deck.

It's been a while since I played 2 player Agricola - and I think it was the first time Steve had played it.

2 Player plays very well - as it allows you to pay more attention to your opponent and predict what he will do - Which at times is nigh well impossible with higher player numbers!!

Anyway I came out on top - mainly due to my Lasso which allowed me to take two actions in a row if one of the actions involves taking animals - the killer action being when I took build fireplace and immediately took 4 sheep and cooked them - something that Steve thought I wouldn't do as I had nowhere to store the sheep.

Final score was as follows.

Richard 37, Steve 29

29th March - H20lland

I couldn't make it this week, here's a write up from Steve: After playing a lot of familiar games recently, to introduce them to Ben, I fancied trying something new and chose H2Olland as being the biggest 'big box' game in my collection that had a chance of finishing in an evening. I was a lttle concerned that it might not work well with 3, as the player starting in the 'middle' has no adjacent areas that only he can reach quickly, but the rules about where new farms can be started fix that, as long as the middle player is also the start player, as by chance he (Richard) was. The biggest problem with the game was that the resource production rates and the building costs do not mesh together very well. Everyone starts with the same selection of 'seeds' and no reason not to plant them all, so everyone then gets the same 'income' during the harvest, and pretty much has to buy the same stuff with it to avoid being left with unusable resources - as Matt pointed out, this is a 'rich get richer' game, so stockpiling isn't a strategy. Later in the game, everyone found that they were producing a lot more resources than they could spend, but were prevented from saving them because of the limit of 5 items that can be carried over. By the end everyone had placed all of their farms and windmills, and all of their workers were employed, so there was no potential for strategy decisions there, and the winner was simply the one who had fortuitously placed his windmills to give him a monopoly over the most valuable tulip fields. Perhaps if you had to maintain your buildings each year by paying, say, one resource of the type needed to build them for each one, and if you had to feed or pay your workers, then there would be more decisions to make. The issue of 'shared fields' also needs to be addressed, perhaps by requiring players to move workers to them before they can claim the resources, a la Keythedral. Anyway, the final scores, for which the players can claim neither credit nor blame, were: Steve 71, Matt 68, Richard 50

22nd March - Amun Re

Amun Re this week, Lance joined us and beat us all.

Lance 43, Steve 37, Ben 35, Garry 34, Matt 31

Then we finished up with a game of Escalation.

Lance 14, Matt 31, Steve 34, Ben 39, Garry 46

15th March - Steam

We thought it was time to introduce Ben to Steam, Lance had only played Age of Steam once and that was years ago. We played the basic game which makes the finanaces a bit easier to control.

Matt 44 (tiebreak), Garry 44, Ben 42, Steve 20, Lance 19

8th March - El Grande

An oldie this week (no, not me, the game), I've not played El Grande for years, didn't seem as nasty as I remember.

Matt 110, Garry 91, Steve 83, Ben 79

Then time for a few rounds of Hols der Geier

Steve 44, Matt 32, Garry 24, Ben 20

1st March - Caylus

I was away last week but Matt sent me the results of the Caylus 'they shoot horses don't they' endurance fest.

Steve 114, Ben 93 Matt 83
what! what! what! Matt beaten by a newbie?

22nd Feb - Ingenious

Matt was going to be a bit late so Steve and I started with a couple of games of Jaipur.

Garry 2 Steve 0

Once Matt arrived we played Samurai, I've had this for years but not played it much recently.

Matt won on the number of tokens captured.

We still had plenty of time so we played a couple of games of Ingenious.

Garry 9, Steve 8, Matt 7
Matt 9, Steve 8, Garry 7