November 5, 2009 Session Report

Very pleased to see a huge jump in attendance this week, which was greatly appreciated after the decline in recent weeks. We had all four of us from the prior week (Mike, Paul, Clayton and myself) plus Ron, Jonathan and Sarah (all of whom I hadn't seen for awhile) in addition to Greg, Don, Doug and Ben for a grand total of 11. We played the following games: TransAmerica, Pillars of the Earth, Age of Steam, Hoity Toity, Days of Steam, and R-Eco, and this doesn't count a couple of games that Sarah played solo while patiently waiting for one of the longer games to finish.

TransAmerica was a quick warmup, just one round, while waiting for people to arrive. Mike won the round, with Jonathan, John, Paul, Greg and Ron also participating. Then we split into two groups for longer games that we kind of the feature event of the evening. At one table, we had Jonathan, Ben, Ron, Greg and Don playing a five-player Age of Steam and the report I got was the game ended in a tiebreak between Ben and Ron. The Pillars game, also a five-player used the expansion which tries to balance out some of the luck factor in the game. This, too, was a close finish (at least for three of us), final scores were John 48, Mike 45, Doug 43, Paul 31 and Clayton 20.

In the middle of these two games Sarah arrived, and while I tried to offer her the chance to team up with one of the players in our Pillars game (and, judging by the score, it looked like Clayton could have used her assistance), but she bided her time by playing a couple of solitaire games (card and Can't Stop played solo). We then got her in a game as Pillars wrapped up, which wound up being a four-player Hoity Toity which was won by Doug; Paul and I were the other two players (Paul came second while I had a miserable game and came last). Then the Age of Steam game finished and the players tackled the simpler and shorter Days of Steam, which Ben had brought. Unfortunately, that game didn't finish. Clayton returned to the other group and we played a five-player R-Eco, which wrapped up the evening with another win for Doug, as usual a low scoring affair: Doug 10, John 7, Paul 6, Sarah 3, Clayton 2.

Next week, of course, will be EuroQuest, but I left a couple of scoresheets for those in attendance to track results in my absence. Hope to see many of you at EQ and hope everyone else will stop in at the club on Thursday.