We had eight in attendance for tonight's session. The group consisted of Ron, Paul, Doug, Gabe, Tim, Don, Clayton and myself. We had two games going for just about the entire session. Games played: Defenders of the Realm, Tour-Cycle Free, Beowulf and Ticket to Ride-1910. Some details follow.
Ron had brought Defenders of the Realm back for a second try; Paul, Doug and Gabe were the other players in this cooperative game. No details, except that, for the second week in a row, the players lost. From what I could tell, the game went a bit faster this time, ending around 8:30 or so.
I convinced the rest of the group to try Tour-Cycle Free, a new cycling game I had downloaded the rules and most components, using some plastic cyclists from other games. The game has six-man teams of cyclists based on real-life performance in races like the Tour de France. Tim took the purple cyclists from the SaxoBank team, featuring Fabian Cancellara (nicknamed Spartacus) from Switzerland and two-time Tour de France runner-up Andy Schleck. Don opted for the RadioShack team (wearing red) included Lance Armstrong and Levi Leipheimer. I went with the winner of the last two Tours, Alberto Contador and the Astana team (in yellow). Clayton, who arrived while we were still setting up, wound up with the blue team (featuring Cadel Evans of Australia). To test the game over various terrain types, we used a stage from this week's Tour of Spain that seemed particularly challenging.
The race took an interesting turn when Tim put his top rider, Andy Schleck, in an early break. The rest of us stayed with him, but with lesser cyclists while holding our top guys back in the Peleton. Tim really stomped on the pace at the front of the Peleton with Cancellara, who was rated high on everything except the challenging high mountains that were coming. Since this was my first play of the game with live humans, there were some rules issues -- not sure I had all the right answers. Anyway, we decided to end it early after the finish of the first really tough climb. With this understanding, everybody sent their key men out on a break. It came down to a battle of six cyclists with the top rating on the mountains, and in a sprint, it went to Contador (John's team) by a narrow margin over Evans (Clayton's team). Third was Schleck (Tim's team) followed by Leipheimer (Don's team). Lance Armstrong didn't figure in the final sprint as his mountain rating in this game was one lower than the others.
Thus abbreviated, the cycling game was on its final turn when the other table was finishing up. So, we re-split the groups and played two more games: Ticket to Ride and Beowulf. Ticket to Ride, using the 1910 Mega version with the US map, finished first, with Doug coming out on top with 146, John 122, Tim 101, Clayton 61. Tim went for long routes but didn't take additional tickets. I focused on additional tickets but most of mine were of the single digit variety although I did get the bonus for most completed tickets. Doug had the winning plan, completing all his tickets, most with higher point values than mine. We actually forgot to award the 10 points for longest train (as you can see from the scores, it didn't matter), but I think Doug would have gotten that as well.
The Beowulf game barely got done before closing time. Final scores were Ron 28, Gabe 26, Paul 20, Don 9. Sorry, no details on the game, as everyone had to pick up and leave.
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