disappointedSunday afternoon, the gaming group sat down to play some board games.
spross, Tammy, hub_, and myself being present, only oni_neko not being able to make it out to play. While spross had offered to run Desolation, Tammy and the others decided not to take him up on that. So we settled in for an afternoon of board gaming. To put it bluntly, I was bludgeoned to death. Not that I didn't have a good time.We started off the afternoon with a game of The Princes of Machu Picchu, one of those nice Euro board games. While I didn't get off to a bad start, I made a key mistake when I drew my first sacrifice cards, switched up my tactics, and never recovered. The game was a pretty tight one all the way down to the 8th Day, when it looked like the Spanish were going to claim victory over the players. I had a sneaking suspicion that
hub_ was playing for a Spanish victory (which he confirmed later), but spross pulled out the game right at the last moment to give the players victory over the Spanish by claiming the last Virgin. The others had a good number of Priests and Virgins, but I couldn't get anything going since the bonus units were taken largely before I could get to them, and so I spent most of the game having to buy and sell in the Central Plaza, while they just kept racking staff. The scores show what happened to me. Since it looked as if the Spanish might win, I've provided the Victory points below for both the regular and the Spanish win.
Victory Gold Multiplier Final Spanish
Points Score Victory
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JohnK 6 6 1 6 6
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Hubert 19 27 3 19 57
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SteveR 11 18 1 11 11
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Tammy 7 19 2 7 14
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As you can see, pretty clear who won the game both ways. The difference was that
spross came in second with a win by the players, and third with a Spanish victory. Either way, I was just bludgeoned to death. :)After the game of The Princes of Machu Picchu, we switched over to Ticket To Ride, and started out with a 4-player game of the original. The game wasn't too bad, although we played with all the destination tickets from the 1910 Expansion deck. Once again, I made a couple of key mistakes, notably in picking destination tickets. The Nashville-Chicago ticket proved relatively easy, if convoluted, as there was a lot of action along the top part of the Eastern seaboard of North America. And I'm not sure in retrospect that taking the Portland-Nashville ticket was good, as it took me a while to work my way to the Portland end, connecting the the two routes. By that time, the others had claimed a few more tickets, and by the time I drew the next destination, I couldn't connect any of the routes. Still, a good game. Final scores in that game were
spross 140, Tammy 78, hub_ 106, and JohnK 72. *sigh*By that time it was getting to around 5:00 pm, so Tammy had to take off. The rest of us decided to switch to a game of Ticket To Ride: Europe. Once again, I had trouble with the routes. *sigh* I had the ticket from Lisboa-Danzig, and immediately got blocked in the Paris/Bruxelles/Frankfurt area, so had to re-route it through Zurich (which didn't bother me since I had another route there) up through Munchen and Wien and Warszawa, and then in to Danzig. On top of that, it took me three turns to tunnel from Lisboa to Madrid! Of course, if I'd been smart I would have gone through Barcelona and Marseilles, but then I would never have connected a couple of the routes through Amsterdam and Bruxelles using stations later, over to Wilno and Smolensk. Didn't help me win the game, though. Final scores were
spross 127, hub_ 145, JohnK 102. Like I said, bludgeoned at the board gaming table for the day. Still, it was fun, and made for a nice break from roleplaying. May have to get them to do this again for the next couple of weeks. :)