April 11, 2007

Participants: Jon, Zack, Gili, Adam.

A very small group tonight, which was great for me, as I started getting sick earlier in the day and was going to have to kick everyone out early, anyway. Also, it's amazing how quiet four people are compared to a whole group.

Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation

Jon+, Zack

Zack tends to lose this when he plays Elijah, but as this is a fairly quick opening game which he already knew how to play, I opted for it.

I played white. I made an early sacrifice of Gandalf with a low card so that my remaining cards would be one step up over his. This was against Shelob, and therefore I saw, for the first time, Shelob return to her lair.

Zack seemed to be ignoring the search for Frodo, concentrating instead on trying to get into the Shire. Frodo was therefore able to sneak into Mordor before he could do this.

Caylus

Gili 80ish, Jon 70ish, Adam and Zack 60ish

I'm not a big fan of Caylus, but with only Zack and Gili around, and the fact that Gili likes it and Zack had never played, I agreed to give it a go. Then Adam joined us just as I finished explaining the rules and so we made it a four player game.

The game went generally better than the lest few times I played so I wasn't interminably bored. There was a lot of jockeying for position with the turn order and the Provost. Furthermore, every brown building was built before the gray ones began to appear (one gray building was built before the last brown building), and then all but one gray building was built.

As a result of the building order, gold was in very short supply, but we still managed to get a few blue buildings built. Gili was obviously winning already by the last third of the game (one of the problems I have with the game). I knew I could catch up a bit, but not enough.

She built the 25 pointer, and I was ready on the next round to build two smaller blue buildings, when she passed in the placement phase a round before I needed her to, resulting in my being able to collect one less cube than I needed. Lucky for me, I noticed that I could build the small blue building for 7 and a favor, use the favor to get the extra cube I needed, and then in the last scoring phase build the other blue building for 14. Still not enough, as you see.

Adam would have liked to take that 7 point blue building, but I got it first, so instead we helped him notice how he could get the blue building that required pink cubes through some finagling, which he did.

It was only 9:45, but I decided to go to bed.