Sunday, September 20, 2009

September 17, 2009 Session Report

A bit better attendance this week, nine total: Tom, Neil, Doug, Paul, Mike, Don, Greg, Clayton and myself were the group. We played a total of five different games, getting into some longer games to take advantage of the later closing times.

One group (Tom, Paul, Doug, Clayton and I) played Kingsburg using a couple of modules from the recently-released "To Forge a Realm Expansion." The one concept that seems to be generally well-received is the use of chits to add to strength versus the enemies in winter, with the remaining chit worth its value in VPs. Generally speaking, this variant allows for more predictability in the battles but also makes them tougher to win. I managed to pull away to a nice win with the "Embassy Rush" strategy, but it was a very close race for second. Final scores were John 40 Clayton and Doug 27 Paul 25 and Tom 24. Good job by both Clayton and Tom to remain fairly competitive despite having to rebuild some burned-down buildings (courtesy of those nasty Goblins). Tom had the misfortune of rolling 1-1-1 with three dice, then using his re-roll option with the Statue, and rolling another 1, odds of 1/1296.

The other group of four (Greg, Don, Mike and Neil) played the learning version of 18EZ, where each player operates one RR with the objective of building to $1000 in cash. The game is a modular learning game for 18xx type games. Some of the players commented this version has a bias toward whoever goes first, since you aren't guaranteed an equal number of turns.

This same group played a competitive game of Puerto Rico, and my notes say Don got the Guild Hall, Mike got 2 large buildings, and Greg had the customs house. Final scores were 51 for Don, 49 for Mike, 48 for Greg and 30 for Neil. Nice win by Don versus Mike, who won the Puerto Rico tournament at EuroQuest last year.

Two more games to report: one hand of Slide 5 while waiting for the Puerto Rico game to finish, scores ranged from lows of 5-8 (Tom, Clayton and myself) to a high of 27 (Doug) who took the most penalty cards. Then the entire group (or what was left of it) played some Wits and Wagers. Paul started as the reader but took over the purple position when Mike took a bathroom break. Final scores were John 32, Tom 21, Greg 19, Doug 13, Neil 10, Clayton 9 and the Mike/Paul duo, 0. I don't know how I won, since I had no clue on most questions, I just generally bet on answers where there was either a good payoff or a nice gap to the next answer.

Finally, a reminder that weekend after this is Congress of Gamers, a relatively new (fourth year) event that is one of the most economical gaming conventions out there at $5/day. As last year, it will be at the Bauer Drive Community Center in Rockville, MD. I will be running the EuroCaucus event there but there are other cool events like the racing series (featuring McGartlin) and a new series of games called "America First" organized by Mark Love, who has been at our club a few times. Greg, Eric S, Mike and Rodney from our Laurel group and Marcy and Lee from the Columbia group are planning to be on hand to help me with various games in the Euro event, so it should be alot of fun.

Here's the link to the website listing all the events with links to more details on some of them:

http://www.congressofgamers.org/index.php?page=schedule

No comments: