January 17, 2012

Participants: Laurie, Jon, Bill, Shirley, Ellis, Abraham, Ofer, Daniel

I brought Bill and Shirley for a quick visit with me.

Power Grid

Ofer+, Laurie, Ellis

I tried to get Laurie interested in playing Antike, but she preferred to play this again. Ellis wasn’t interested in any of the other games that Laurie offered. The three of them had a good time with this game.

Antike

Abraham 8, Shirley 7, Jon 6, Bill 6

First play for Shirley. I was initially given the Phoenicians, but Abraham insisted I take a more challenging position, so I switched with Shirley and took Greece instead. That put me in last position. After the other three took marble or gold for their opening move, I decided to try opening with iron.

Iron did not serve me well. Even though I was first to get to five cities, I was still underproducing against Shirley who had market and Bill and Abraham who had temples. Bill and Abraham’s temples were chugging out way too many goods, so I had no choice but to threaten them. And I had to threaten Shirley, too, since Phoenicians left to themselves tend to win. That left me to do everyone else’s dirty work while they all got to turtle and acquire points.

Abraham ramped up gold production and threatened to win all his remaining points in Know-hows. I got Bill to take one of them. He then won when Shirley neglected to kill one of his boats and he got to 7 seas. My entire game felt frustrated by lack of resources and bad sente on the rondel. Even so, I scored respectably.

Ticket to Ride Norway

Laurie, Daniel, Ofer

I didn’t see the results of this game. It has pretty colors, though.

[From Laurie] Ofer won the TTR Nordic. He and Daniel scored precisely the same amount of points, in the 90s, and Ofer broke that tie by completing half a dozen destination tickets, compared to Daniel completing none.

(I would have had a similar score had Daniel not scooped up every long route on the board and prematurely ended the game without filling a single destination ticket. So I was one four-car route short of filling all my seven tickets, which led to negative points.)

Detroit-Cleveland Grand Prix

Jon 530, Shirley, Bill, Abraham

First play for everyone else, third play for me. We only had time for two laps.

Laurie keeps refusing to play the game because the board is ugly. Meanwhile, Shirley really liked it, and Abraham and Bill both thought it was good. I enjoyed it again, as usual. I never got quite enough cards to take me all the way around, and so was dependent on the good will (or misplay) or the other players.

In the first lap, I started off very strongly, only to stall midway around. The others enjoyed their congestion problems. I was passed finally right near the end, but Bill played a card that put me within 6 spaces of finishing, and so I just barely finished first, pushing a few other cars over the line at the same time.

In the second lap I had two cars, which is more of a struggle. I concentrated on one, which finished second. My other car didn’t finish at all.