Moved to Tuesday again, since I had a conflict on Wednesday. Gili only showed up at 7:00, and I began explaining to her how to play Mr Jack. The Elijah and his friend Benjamin came as I was finishing the explanation, and Abe a bit after that.
Taj Mahal
Abraham 46, Gili 43 (or something like that), Elijah, Benjamin/AI, JonFirst play for Abraham and Benjamin.
Benjamin neglected to tell us that he had to leave very early, and he suddenly left after turn 6 or 7. We decided to continue him as an AI. He flipped over the top colored card of his deck, adding the top white card, if any, on each turn. He continued playing if the next color matched. He took the most logical locations, and then took random cards.
I lost two very expensive battles early on, and that put me out of contention for the rest of the game. After Benjamin left, my goal was simply to beat the AI. And when the final scores were added up, I actually had one point more than the AI did, which was a great relief. And then it was pointed out that the AI's last move was to take the bonus white card that I had in my hand. So I lost to him by one point, after all.
I was feeling depressed.
Notre Dame
Gili 60, Abraham 52, Jon 48First play for Abraham. Once again I was losing this one very badly until the last round or so. I had to pass the cards my opps wanted in favor of getting the ones I needed; a familiar story, but acutely more painful when you're losing.
I ended up getting a bunch of VP location cards, and the ability to pay for one more, netting me 18 points in the final round. So I didn't get routed, at least. Some of my losses were due to early rat problems.
Abraham did a lot of car moving and Gili did some, too. Gili also got a late Garden, while Abraham took a Notre Dame with no contest on round 6.
Dominion
Jon 49, Abraham 48We had a god-set of action cards: Festival, Market, Village, Smithy, Moat, Library, ... There was Thief, but that doesn't really matter when you don't need a single treasure card in your hand to actually buy something.
Abraham actually trashed all of his coppers for 2 golds. I stole one of them, and the other didn't really matter. He cycled through his entire deck until he started filling up with VPs. I had a much more diverse hand.
He started out three Provinces ahead of me, but we kept count, and I began to catch up, gaining something like 3 Provinces to his 2. As the Provinces were running out, I had to start buying Duchys (when I could) to ensure the game would continue. And on one of those occasions, I bought an additional Estate.
That was the one point I needed to win the game, when I took the last Province.
3 comments:
In the Taj Mahal game I would have continued on as a four-player game; it seems like having a robot player would add far too much randomness. Besides, I can't think that it screws anything up to have one player stop playing, assuming you adjust the number of cards you lay out at the beginning of the round.
Based on your description of your Dominion game it sounds like you're using the wrong setup for two players. There are only eight of each cards in each VP stack (including Gardens).
Nice catch. Yeah, I noticed this halfway through the game.
I'll try it the real way next time, but the game seems to play fine with 12 cards in each VP pile.
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