September 6, 2007 Session Report

Once again, we had a total of 8 gamers in attendance: Gabe, Doug, Nicole, Beth, Clayton, Sarah, Eric and myself. With the added hour, we got in more games than in most of our recent sessions. Games played (and I hope this is a complete list): Parlay, Sequence (4 times), Lost Cities (5 times), Hey Thats My Fish, Tsuro, Power Grid, Guillotine, Blokus Trigon and Loco, for a total of 16 plays of nine different games, at least that's what I counted on the sheets.

Details: The Parlay game was a 6-player, with Sarah joining after missing out the first two hands and winning her first hand with a nice score of 100 pts. The game was won by Gabe with 545 pts (winning condition is 500) with Doug second at 400. Sarah wound up third at 250 and Nicole, Beth and I also participated (scores withheld at personal request).

Eric brought a game called Sequence that proved to be fairly popular. He taught the game to Clayton, winning two out of three. Later, Sarah won a three-player game over Nicole and Gabe. Sorry I missed out on the chance to play this one -- it looked interesting.

Lost Cities had a nice revival, as both of the club copies were in play at once for a good part of the evening. The scores had Clayton edging out Nicole in one game, Gabe and Sarah tying in another, Gabe topping Sarah in a third game (I believe Sarah was playing LC for the first time, however), while Beth and I had quite a tussle which finally turned my way in the final hand as I wiped out a 41-point deficit as Beth got some bad cards, or so she said. I think there was a fifth game played involving Clayton and either Sarah or Gabe, but sorry no results reported. (Another tie, perhaps?)

The one long game played was a four-player Power Grid on the always challenging Italy map. Eric, Doug, Beth and I had played before so it was a tough game that got even tougher as the Power Plant market got jammed up. When the first jam occurred in Phase 1, it looked like Doug had the advantage. But when Phase 3 got started, Eric got a nice 7 garbage plant that let him get to 17 cities and take the win with Doug just one city behind, followed by Beth and then yours truly in last.

Other games: Tsuro, a three-player won by Gabe versus Sarah and Nicole: Hey That's My Fish, two-player, Gabe with 57 and Sarah with 42; Blokus-Trigon, another three-player won by Doug who got all his pieces on the board, followed by Eric with 4 and Nicole with 11 (low scores are better); then Guillotine, with Doug coming out on top in a close one, 21-19 over Nicole while Eric came in third despite bagging Marie Antoinette.

We wound up the evening with a game of Loco, which I thought I knew but didn't. The game was a 4-player but since there were six of us, we had a played with a couple of teams. Eric took the game with 18 points; other scores were 13 for the John/Clayton team, 12 for Doug and 10 for Nicole/Beth team. However, I claim a moral victory since Clayton and I were the only new players to the game.

I got to play a wide variety of games and enjoyed the session even though I didn't do that well in many of the games. Looking forward to this weekend's TriadCon convention in College Park and hope to see everyone next week.