April 07, 2010

Participants: Jon, David, Nadine, Lori, Gili, Abraham

Lori is a new attendee who found us through an Internet search. She had no gaming experience.

It's Alive

Lori+, David, Jon, Nadine, Gili

I don't prefer this five player, but this one moved ok. And it was nice for the new player to win. We played the basic game.

Settlers of Catan

Lori 10, Jon 9, Gili 8

And she won this one, too, but it was pretty close. I got hit by the robber three times, and was one card away from stealing Longest Road from her.

After two new games, Lori couldn't handle learning any other new ones.

Power Grid

David 15, Nadine 14, Abraham 13

It looked like Nadine was winning through most of the game, but, as is usual for Power Grid, only the last few rounds really made a difference. They played on France.

Boggle

Jon, Gili, Lori

Lori couldn't handle any new games, but she could play this. Gili, on the other hand, is a native Hebrew speaker, so this was a challenge for her. I'm fairly facile at the game.

To balance the game, we played with handicaps. I could only find words of five letters or more, Lori had to find four letters, and Gili three letters. We earned for any words not on the other players' lists, and +1 bonus point for each letter beyond our minimum (so I earned 2 points for a six letter word). This worked fairly well.

Gili won about half the games, but not by a large amount. We had a few boards where I couldn't find any five letter words, though I could see a number of four letter words that the others missed.

Tichu

Jon/Abraham 1090, David/Nadine 1010

A complete game, which lasted about 2 hours and 12 rounds. Abraham bid and made two grand tichu's. Scoring was very close the entire game.