September 18, 2008 Session Report

We had a total of seven gamers for this week's session: Doug, Don, Paul, Clayton, Ben, Sarah (welcome back to Sarah) and myself. We had two tables going for most of the time and played a total of seven different games: R-Eco (twice), Vikings, Settlers (using a new variant idea I came up with), Ticket to Ride - Nordic edition, Sticheln, Power Grid - Korea map and For Sale.

Don had brought Vikings and was itching to give it a go, and since Doug was familiar enough with the rules to do the teaching, four of us (Paul, Don, Doug and myself) played. It was a fairly close contest among three of us (Don, Doug and myself) until we got to the endgame scoring and realized how important getting those little blue guys was. Doug pulled away for a comfortable win, with 53 to 45 for me, 41 for Don and 27 for Paul as he was the only one to feed all his guys.

Ben, Clayton and Sarah tried out my new Settlers variant, which was to roll four dice (Can't Stop style) and then pair them together for two production numbers (with perhaps a robber or two thrown in). I was surprised by how quickly the game ended, perhaps because there was all that extra production. Ben won, getting a couple of cities up early. The game took around a half hour and there was very little trading that took place.

The Vikings group had started early and we played one hand of Sticheln which barely finished while the Settlers game was being cleaned up; Doug had high score of 11 and everyone was positive even though some took some tricks with negative scores. Sarah, Doug and Clayton played a couple of quick games of R-Eco (both won by Doug, although one was really close between Doug and Sarah) while Paul, Ben, Don and I tackled the new Power Grid-Korea map which I had just brought. Main feature of the map is two separate resource markets, one for North Korea, a different one for South Korea, you can only buy from one each turn. I managed to win by building to 17 when I had the plants and resources to power 15 while no one else could get to more than 14. Ben tried an interesting strategy of building all four of the cheap connections in Seoul on the first turn; he eventually got blocked in though, hurt by the fact he was going last in subsequent turns. Need to try the game some more to see whether or not this is a viable strategy; my guess is that it is not.

Meanwhile Doug, Sarah and Clayton broke out another new game, Ticket to Ride - Nordic Edition, which I had managed to obtain at the Family Game Store in Savage (big plug for them -- they are now an official GCOM location, hosting sessions every Saturday night). Another close game, won by Doug with 99 to 95 for Sarah. After this game and Power Grid finished, there were only about 20 minutes left in the session, and those of us still left played a quick game of For Sale to wrap things up. Final scores: John 60 Ben 55 Paul 53 Doug 39 Clayton 38. See everyone next week, and don't forget about Congress of Gamers this weekend.