Wednesday night at CHG

It's been a hectic week. I haven't been working, as the school year ended and I don't have a summer job yet, but it seems all my mental space is taken up with thoughts about the future. I really haven't managed to accomplish too much, but I've felt pretty frazzled the whole time. One of the biggest things is looking for a job for next yeat - I hate filling out all the background information and such. Teachers have it bad, too. I've never had to jump through more hoops than when looking for teaching jobs. For obvious reasons, I guess, but it's still a pain to have to do it over and over...

Well, I guess what I'm getting at is that it was nice to get out of the house. I spent some time considering which games to take, and ended up filling my box with Princes of Florence, St. Petersburg (which I thought other people might be interested in), Through the Desert (which has been a nice, quick, ender), and Nexus Ops (which still hasn't seen the table). I had a nice dinner with Kristin, another successful variation on her "pasta bake" recipe, and drove over to the store.

I arrived just in time, apparently. There were people playing Magic and Bloodbowl, and an RPG in the back. A few people were just setting up Elasund, and I thought I might be out of luck... But, apparently, the Elasund group had been trying to get a 5th for Santiago, and were happy to set it aside for me to join in. How lucky!

For those of you unfamiliar with Santiago, it's an Amigo game, published in the U.S. by Z-man Games. Here's a link to the boardgamegeek.com page: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/8125. It's a fairly big box game that has strong tile-laying, resource management, and bidding aspects. It's set on the Cape Verde island of Santiago, off the west coast of Africa. The theme involves plantation owners trying to successfully produce their crops, while competing over scarce water. Each turn, the players bid for turn order. On their turn, each player picks a plantation tile (peppers, beans, sugar cane, potatoes, or bananas) and places it on the board. The player who passes first in bidding (or, if nobody passes, the player with the lowest bid) becomes the canal overseer. After the tiles have been placed, players take turns making suggestions about which canal, and hence which plantations, should be watered for the turn. They may offer the overseer financial incentives, either cooperatively or competitively. The canal overseer places the water. Unsupplied plantations suffer drying, which could make them either less valuable or actually useless. The game runs over nine such rounds, and at the end the players recieve money based on the size of their plantations and the number of workers on them, and the player with the most money wins.

I'd played Santiago once before, with Kurt and some others at one of Chris and Edie's famous game days. That day, I found it an interesting game with a lot of player interaction and wonderfully complex bidding elements. We played a game that seemed to revolve around working with majority coalitions to control the water, and I ended up winning that game by one Escudo over Kurt, something like 102-101. Last night's group, composed of Erin, Chris, Gare, Kurt, and myself promised an engaging play.

From the get go, last night's play was different. On the first turn, I ended up taking the overseer. The other four players, rather than trying to work together to get the water pumped in a specific direction, tried to give me as many choices as possible. Chris made a nice move, giving me a cheap option that didn't help anyone else, and the other players underbid for water. I ended up running the water away from them, and cutting down on the scoring right away. This trend continued, as the water stayed pretty limited and players continued to make plays that would promote the drying of someone's crops. There were also a number of blocking plays, as players with a piece they couldn't make a lot out of consistently used them to limit the expandability of specific crops. I was the canal overseer a number of times, and managed to build up a fist full of Escudos, while still getting in on some decent crops. In the end, I had 64 escudos, enough for the win. I can't remember the order of finishing behind me, I think maybe Gare had second but I'm not sure at all. Maybe someone will post to remind me.

After the game, the idea of playing something else was brought up, and I was rather surprised that the consensus was to play Santiago again. I generally enjoy getting to play a game twice in one night - to see the strategy develop, have better plays, etc., however, it seems increasingly rare in a world of large and ever-expanding game collections, with so many games competing for table time. Everyone was ready for another crack, though, and we got going right away.

This time, we used the three palm trees, that provide an extra worker on their spaces. Chris randomized their placement with some dice. We started off much like the last game left off, with people fighting to take the water in different directions, rather than forming larger groups to pool money to bribe the overseer. Chris had an excellent play in the third round, managing to be the overseer without passing, paying one escudo, and then taking a bonus space with a two worker tile. Unfortunately for him, this potentially big play turned sour when he was cut off from increasing the size of the crop (it did only have two open sides when he took it). This was the trend in the mid game - crops were cut off and kept fairly small. I, unfortunately, got six of my workers stuck on very mediocre (4 tile) crops. New crops that were started, though, went much bigger, including bananas, potatoes, and sugar cane. I only managed to get in on the sugar, unfortunately, and, despite some pleasant late game overseeing, I couldn't rack up a lot of points. There were a couple really nice plays made in this game, especially by Gare and Chris, with water bribes that were very nicely calculated to give the best shared advantage to themselves and the overseer. People also really started to get good with tile placement in respect to probable watering, especially Erin, which was one of the factors that one her the game. When the seeds were all gone, Erin was the planter with the most successful harvest, netting 60 escudos. I rolled up my wagon in second with 54, and I think Chris and Gare tied for 3rd with 43. I'm not sure how many Kurt ended up with.

By the time we finished up, it was 9:30 and really too late to start anything else. Everyone else headed for home. I stuck around a little while to talk to Jeremiah about the Game of Thrones CCG. I'm supposed to go to a tournament in Missouri on Friday, but I'm not sure I want to go right now, as I'm so busy and have not had time to play. I guess we'll see what I can get done today (if I can get the dang North Carolina Public Schools application webpage to load!). Overall, it was a great night, and I have to thank Kurt for bringing the game, and everyone for being such a swell group of folks to fight over water with.

GG, GL