October 17, 2013 Session Report

Much bigger turnout this week, total of nine:  Mike, Ben, Doug, Neville, Andrew (he's new to the club, works with Neville), Tim, Helen, Rembert and myself.  We played a total of four games:  Ultimate Werewolf: Inquisition, Race for the Galaxy, Lords of Waterdeep and Agricola.

Started off the evening with Ultimate Werewolf: The Inquisition, which is the first published design by Legend Dan Hoffman, who I imagine many of you know from his business (Canton Games) and/or at various GCOM gaming events and conventions.  The game is a Werewolf variant with no player elimination, as the teams remain intact as the number of inhabitants of the werewolf-infested village shrinks until one side is control.  In our game, we had seven (Helen and Rembert had yet to arrive) which meant three on the Werewolf side, four for the Villagers.  A pretty deal for the Werewolves, if you ask me, since I was one of them. We got off to a good start when my fellow Werewolf, Ben, drew the #1 position and took the Seer.  Tim, one of the Good Guy villagers, immediately took Sorcerer and vouched for Ben, who of course had taken a laid back approach to conceal his identity.  This got Andrew confused, and he mistakenly called out both Ben and Tim as Werewolves. Then everyone kind of starting pointing fingers at everyone else -- good for the Werewolves, right?  Well, something strange happened in the middle of the game.  On one of the Night time turns, I passed two cards, one of which was a Werewolf, keeping the Villager (the character due to be eaten) on the bottom. But, by the time the cards were revealed, someone (presumably one of my fellow Werewolfs) had put the Werewolf on the bottom, meaning we were consuming one of our own!  This may have helped, however, as it got some votes removed and four of the remaining six cards shuffled around and confused the Villager team even more.  In the end, it came down to a 50-50 shot and Ben, as the Hunter, put three votes on the last remaining Villager to cinch the win for the Werewolf team of Ben, Doug and myself and with just about all the strong Villager characters having been lynched or eaten, the Good Guys couldn't stop us.  Victory for the Werewolves!  Hurray!

Anyway, in addition to the lack of player elimination, the other cool thing is just about everyone has the opportunity to be a special character, something you don't see in the regular game.  Definitely superior to the regular Werewolf, and it plays alot quicker; our game, which clocked in a just under an hour, took about as long as possible as we had seven, several people new to Werewolf in general, and we went down to the very last two cards.  I think some people (like me) who aren't big Werewolf fans will like this game, which plays a bit more like a regular Euro. Only down-side is the bit about passing the cards and closing your eyes; some of us did this better than others.  (Not sure there's a better way to do this, though.)

On to the other games.  Helen and Rembert missed out on Werewolf but ran through a few quick turns of Race for the Galaxy; it was mainly a teaching game for Rembert, who hadn't played before, so no scores were kept.  We still had about two hours left in the session, and four of us opted for Agricola while the other five played Lords of Waterdeep.  I was in the Agricola game with Tim, Ben and Andrew, who claimed to have an affinity for the game, until a Tim pointed out a rule he had missed about how the animals reproduce.  For my part, I floundered around and was not as efficient in most of my actions, although I did manage to build two rooms at once at get them converted to Clay.  In the end, though, it was Ben, who had grabbed a bunch of Wood and got all 15 fences down in one play, who edged Tim for the win.  But my performance was not all that pathetic, as I managed to finish ahead of Andrew, getting all my spaces filled (albeit with no animals).  Andrew just wasn't able to bounce back after the rules miscue.  Final scores:  Ben 35, Tim 33, John 26, Andrew 22.

No details on the Lords of Waterdeep game, won by Neville, except for the fact that the scores indicate it was really close:  Neville 108  Rembert 106  Doug 102 Mike 99 Helen 95

I have been reminding everyone about my favorite time of the year, the EuroQuest convention, which is now less than three weeks away.  Pre-reg deadline (with cheaper prices!) is Nov. 1.  See www.euroquestcon.com for details.  The club session the week before EQ -- Thursday, Nov. 7 -- I hope to have a few Essen games on hand.  The following Thursday, though, many of us will NOT be at the Club although the CC will be open, and the club games will be accessible for anyone who shows up.