Game Night at Rick & Marnee's, Durham, NC

Things fell into place for me to be able to make my 2nd Meetup Group game event. This one took on added importance, as it was the first in my new home town, Durham. This event isn't strictly a Meetup event - it has been, apparently, going on for several years. It's a general gaming night at the fine home of a very pleasant couple.

I got there shortly after the posted start time of 7 pm. There were probably 7 or 8 people there, counting the hosts. The population quickly swelled, however, and it was time for gaming to begin.

While we were standing around chatting, waiting for people to arrive, Jeff whipped out Lightspeed and explained it to David and I. It's a quick little cardgame with dexterity/speed/miniatures game elements that plays in maybe ten minutes. It's a little frenetic, and is certainly for people who have a little more energy for their gaming than me... You each have a deck of ships, with guns shooting in specific directions, and sometimes shields on certain sides. You flip down ships until someone is through their deck, at which time you stop, and, through order of initiative, shoot eachother along the lines of the guns as shown on your ships. Ships accrue damage, and, when destroyed, count as points. You can also get points by shooting minerals off of asteroids. Well, Jeff was through his deck quickly, and I only got about half of my ships down. Jeff shot a bunch of stuff, I shot a couple things, David shot some of his own ships (negative points), and we ended the game in that order, with scores of, I believe, 14//7/0. Not really my type of game, but an interesting implementation of some fun ideas.

Rick, Chris, Dave, and one other player settled in to play Britannia, with the designer of the game, Lew, looking on. I opted out of this game as I didn't want to commit to a big game that late at night, or to spend my whole first event there looking at the same four other people. The game interests me, though, and hopefully there will be other chances to play it. They were the first to get set up, and were still playing when I left, around 1 AM.

It was still just the three of us, and we decided on Samurai, the game I had brought that fit best for three players. Jeff wanted to try it as he is a bit of a Knizia fan, apparently. Halfway through the rules explanation more players arrived, and we added Eric to our game. Eric and David had played more than me, and Jeff was new.

Initial piece placement was interesting as there was a definite trend for people to try and create small groups of double-influence spots. I targetted the center of the board for personal setup, and then tried to event things up around the islands.

Jeff was the first player. He started with his 3 samurai in the central city. David built influence on the towns to the North and South. Eric went primarily to the Northern Island. My opening draw was dissatisfying, with a couple big tiles, three small tiles, and no bonus tiles. In the early game, I felt like I really couldn't make anything happend, and just tried to get my fours in the center. Jeff disrupted me well, though, and closed off the city with one trophy for each of us, and one in a draw. When I finally started to draw bonus tiles, I drew a couple small naval pieces, which weren't doing me a lot of good. In a hurry to get to something more interesting (the ronin tile) I played the navies too early. In fact, I played all my bonus tiles, save the trophy switch and the ronin too early. The one that especially hurt was the two navy, which I should not have played when I did.

The game progressed as a pretty tight affair. This was my first game with four, and I wasn't doing a good job of keeping track of which trophies people were taking. I also always felt like I was one player away from making the moves I would plan out... Like many games, more players is more chaos, making it harder to plan your turn. I made one decent double play which gave me two trophies, and gave one to Jeff which tied him on Buddhas with Eric, the tiles I got being the high-hat and rice, the two that I was fighting for. The game ended with Buddha exhaustion (nice phrase, hunh?), leaving a high hat and rice on the table, which I figured was good for me. I had only managed four of each, though, tying me for the lead in both. It turned out Eric, with his five Buddhas was the only one with a clear majority in anything, and was the deserved winner of the game.

The other table was playing Guillotine, and I discovered that another group had arrived and had been playing TransAmerica in the basement. Eric, David, and myself joined two of them, Brian and Sarah, for Niagara, which was a new one to me. Jeff stayed upstairs to teach Ingenious, and a Pente game got started. Another group pulled out Samurai.

Unfortunately, nobody in our group really knew how to play Niagara, and so Sarah was reading through the rules, and then re-explaining them to us, a bit at a time. This took a while, but I didn't feel in a hurry. We got it figured out, and got started. I was in the last seat with green boats (like you care).

The funky river/falls mechanic of Niagara is quite charming. Really a neat idea. I started off with a cloud right away, as I wanted to see the water move a lot! Our group was pretty conservative, though, staying away from the edge. In fact, nobody went over the falls the whole game!

For those who aren't familiar with the game, I'll note that it was last year's SDJ winner. It is a fairly family oriented strategy game, with neat looking components, and a realy cool mechanism in which the board drapes over the game box, forming a channel for a set of clear plastic discs which represent the water in the river, on which you are fiecely paddling your little kayak in search (somehow) of gems. You have a set of movement tiles with numbers from 0(cloud) to 6, which you chose and play each turn to move your boats, to get gems from the river bank, and bring back to the dock. You can also steal gems from other boats if you land on their space while going upstream.

I decided to just, you know, get my feet wet, and then see how the water felt, before developing a hard strategy. There are 3 ways to win: 4 of a kind of one color gem, one each of five different colored gems (out of six), or seven total. I figured, I'd see which ones looked good to get in a reasonable time, and go for that.

So, I jumped out with a cloud and got the river moving. Then, I started getting my boats in the water, and was able to accrue four purple gems and a diamond. I was one purple away from winning, but that color is closest to the dock, and the last two got picked up on this turn. They got picked up by Eric, who looked like he could win by getting them in, but Brian made a clever steal to deny him. I wasn't in good turn order, or position, and couldn't get in on a steal. David, meanwhile, was also only one gem from winning, but he had four different gems, meaning that he only needed one of two different colors for the victory. It took another couple turns, but he got a diamond in for the victory. I think we all had fun with this one, and I'd like to play it again with an experienced group, when I think it would fly. It really didn't deserve as much time as we put into it.

Other games were all still in progress with the remaining attendees, so the five of us dragged out the copy of Santiago that Thoughthammer was kind enough to ship to me last week. David had his eye on it as one to buy, and wanted to try it out. I was happy to get it on the table so soon. Brian and Sarah had each played once before.

I went through the teaching, and we got started. I really like Santiago. It's a well designed game, fairly quick, which is really it's own game. It has connection/set collection/bidding elements, and synthesizes them well. The thing I like most about this game, I think, is that, while being a very interesting exercise, it is also very conducive to social interaction, especially through the bribery phase. There's also a bit of a "take that" element, which is not too heavy handed, however.

I've explained Santiago before, I think, but, for the sake of thoroughness, I'll say this: It's a game in which the players are plantation owners, bidding on tiles that represent fields to add to the plantations, and then bribing the canal overseer to make sure that the fields get watered, so they don't dry up and become worthless. There's rarely free water, and often there's not enough water for everything to get some, so drying is just going to happen, and the game is fairly confrontational. One more note - this is an Amigo game, distributed in the U.S. by Z-man Games. I have to admit that, aside from it being a good game, one of the things that originally motivated me to buy it was that I just wanted to buy something without a Rio Grande logo on it for a change!

I started off really well with two two-yield bean fields in a square of four, with David having one-yield tokens on the other two. This square was right in the middle, and hence had a lot of frontage to expand. However, the bean tiles stopped showing up, which stand to reason, and other plantations got bigger. Most of us got in on a big potato plantation on top of the beans. Bananas and Peppers got started to the right. Sugar cane got going to the left. First potatoes, then sugar, got really big (seven or eight tiles out of nine!) While this was happening, peppers managed to also get up to seven just at the end of the game. I only managed to get the beans up to six, I think. It could have been eight, but I was unable to get the connections watered for two turns in a row, right at the end.

This particular play was noteworthy in that Brian did a very good job of trying to vary the board and not let things just go one way. Also, in general, everyone seemed happy to grow most of the plantations, and weren't really looking at blocking things off, or taking tiles to put them out of position to deny someone the chance to grow. We ended up with four really big plantations, which I don't think has really happened for me before. There was only one tile, I think, that dried up to desert before the end of the game, when there were a bunch. We all used our bonus canals pretty early. Unfortunately, I used mine too early, even though I was the last to play one. I guess I just used it at a bad time - if I'd held on to it, as I should have, I would have been able to water more beans, and probably would have scored 15-25 more points. Instead, I played it for a measly 4 points of peppers (that turned out to be seven in the end, so, I guess, a net loss of 8-18).

In the end, Brian prevailed with 86, David had 81, I had 77, Sarah had, I think, 70, and Eric was in the high fifties, after having had some bad luck with tiles getting cut off. I think everyone enjoyed it fairly well, although, like our Niagara game, there was a lot of extended thinking and analysis in this game, with much more time being taken during turns than I'm used to. I think that might have been an artifact of the particular group, though.

When we got done, I was amazed to find out that it was close to 12:30. I got ready to leave, but ended up talking with David, and somewhat with Rick, for about half an hour. It was really nice to get a chance to chat with them, and was a pleasant end to a fun evening. I'll get another chance to game with David at the event he's hosting next Tuesday.

GG, GL,
JW