May 7, 2009 Session Report

OK, onto the report for last night's session. We had a really good turnout, total of 11, one new attendee, Abraham, who said he read one of the ads in the local newspapers which proves they are still running our ads. Others in attendance were Don, Ron, Gabe, Clayton, Mike, Paul, Doug, Ray, Ben and myself. We played a total of five different games over the course of the evening (two games getting multiple plays for nine games total), and usually we had at least two and sometimes three games going on at once.

First up was Catan-Germany, a new Settlers variant I had tried and bought last week at Games Days. It features these neutral buildings that are slightly less expensive than a city (one ore and one wheat less) that give you a VP and an immediate benefit in cards or resources. I managed to win a fairly close game over Paul, Doug and Clayton. The other group played Small World, and reportedly Don scored a crushing victory over Gabe, Mike, Don and Abraham. Once Ray arrived, he and Ben hooked up in a series of Roll Through the Ages games; reportedly, they completed four (!) games, three wins for Ben and one for Ray.

By this time Ben had arrived and he talked five of us into playing a favorite game of his, Terra. Paul appeared to be banking some high value cards (who knows for sure, because we never checked them) and the players came close to winning with only a couple of cards and one crisis to go before the deck ran out when we got hit with the seventh full-blown crisis which we couldn't manage. Doug, Ray, and I joined Ben and Paul in this one but, as I said, all players lost because some of us may have been a bit too greedy.

The final series of games included a second Small World, a four-player won by Ray (90) to 82 for Paul, 74 for Ben and 63 for Clayton. Looks like y'all did better than I did in my first game. Gabe had brought another favorite of his, Parthenon, and it wound up being a six-player game that didn't quite get through the end of year two. When we picked it up, Ron had 11 structures; Don, Mike and Gabe each had 10; Doug had 9; I trailed with 7 after not rebuilding two starting villages that got hit by Hubris (or was it one of those other disasters?).