October 31. 2013 Session Report

Turnout of six for the first Halloween night club session in memory.  Mike, Ben, Doug, Tim, Rembert and I were the attendees.  We played a total of four games:  Gipsy King, Power Grid -Quebec (three players plus the robot), Global Warming and Maori, and I am pleased to report that (1) I got to play three of them and (2) we had four different winners and a couple of very close games.

First up was Gipsy King, a nice short game while waiting for more people to show up.  It was a four-player, won by Ben who came storming from behind with a 36-point caravan after I had seized an early half-time lead.  Final scores were close, six points top to bottom:  Ben 66 John 63 Mike 61 Doug 60.

Rembert and Tim arrived, and we split into two groups of three for the remainder of the session.  One group (Mike, Tim and Ben) played Power Grid with the robot four-player and the Quebec map.  Resources (especially coal) got real tight as the robot implemented a hoarding strategy.  In the end, Tim built to 18 but could only power 15, so the winner was Mike at 17, followed by Tim at 15, then Ben and the robot with 11 but the record should show that Ben had more money than the robot.

I brought a game that was shown at Essen a couple of years back called Global Warming, and Doug and Rembert decided to give it a try..  It has a US designer but hadn't hit the mainstream market but I recently discovered it listed at Funagain, so I decided to order it.  Like CO 2, the game has differing ending conditions depending on how much global pollution is generated.  I may have benefited from having done a couple of solo plays and managed to win, hitting the endgame goal of 25 compared to 19 for Doug and 12 for Rembert; had the alternate scenario (of too much global warming) taken place, Rembert would have won because he contributed the least damage to the planet.

The three of us wrapped up the evening with Maori, which Doug had brought, and it was the closest game of the evening:  31-31-30 with Rembert edging me out on the tiebreaker for first (one shell to zero).  Doug had three shells remaining, so he would have won had he been tied for first.

A reminder that next week, the session before EuroQuest, and Mike and I will be on hand with a couple of the Essen games that we have volunteered to demo -- we obviously would like to do a dry run to familiarize ourselves with the games.  Mike will be demoing a game called Coal Baron, I will have Lewis & Clark.  Hope we get enough attendance to get both games going at once!  (We will be setting up around 6, so everyone is encouraged to arrive on time.)