The E.B.G.G. report

An article by Don Quixote    No Comments

The E.B.G.G. report:
(Evening Board Game Gathering)

The night started with the prompt arrival of Mark and Ellen Robbins. Since the other guests hadn’t arrived yet, I gave them a brief tour of Hive. For those who haven’t caught me saying it a hundred times over, Hive is probably my all time favorite two player game. It’s a simple abstract strategy game about bugs. You can read all the rules and even play against the computer at www.hivemania.com (on your own personal time or lunch hours of course). Ellen and I were able to thoroughly beat up on Mark and that ended that experience. Hopefully next time Mark and I will have a chance to play a few games as I think he would be measure for my skill.

Shortly there after Jon & Bobby arrived and we decided that we would all play a game of Tongiaki. Is a really simple game to teach people and plays rather quickly. In it you are trying to get as many of your ships on as many islands as possible to secure the most points. The key to the game (and I can share this now that game night is over) is diversity. Use every chance you get to be on someone else’s beach, the more they spread, the more you spread and the more points you get. Once you get to a “good island” (meaning one of high point value), then stick as many ships there as you can. Not in the hopes of making yourself king of the island, but rather to ship everyone else off (including most of your guys). It removes them for the island while expanding your point total. Michelle was late in getting to the table so we played a few of her turns for herI believe that I came in first with 24ish points, and Mark brought up the rear with under 10 (I could be wrong, but it was low.

From there we decided to pay a game of Metro. Metro is a game that many of us had played before and is a game of making the longest rail route that you can. This is also a classic game of disadvantage your neighbor where sometimes the best move is to end someone else’s track rather than expanding your own. It was a heated contest through much of the game until we all got down to our final stations (as a side note, the interesting thing about playing with 6 players is that each person only gets 5 stations so every piece counts). On the luck of the draw I was able to pull out a piece that sent my train looping back into the central station and double my points for a whopping 24 point route sending me into an almost untouchable first place. Michelle rounded out second, Mark, Bobby & Jon were bunched in the middle and Ellen was just a step or two behind that.

Mark and Ellen had to call it an early night around 8, we were sad to see her go as she is always full of surprising things to say, but if we want her to be able to come back again, we understand that we need to be respectful of her bed time.

So now that we were down to four (somewhere in all that Steph stopped by to say hello), it was time to break out the main event: Settlers of Catan.

What a blessed man I am. To be able to play Catan twice in the same day was just the medicine my soul needed.

For many of us, it had been months since we had a chance to play (and why, this is such a great game?!), so I had the upper hand in that my head was still swimming with ideas on how to win. Michelle “I always win dice Games” went first thanks to a good dice roll. The rest of us followed suite. She managed to stake out some nice hexes and the game was on. Bobby setup his first settlement, I came next followed by Jon who was the blessed with the switch back start.

Bobby was bent most of the game on holding the longest road, and had effectively cut off Jon and myself for expanding beyond where we were. I had adopted the ore/wheat strategy that I had seen Regan use earlier that day and that worked to my advantage because the only way for me to win was turn my 4 settlements into cities and hope for victory points from development cards.

The game hung pretty close most of the way through, Bobby, Jon and myself were all around 5 with Michelle leading at 6. Half way through the game she went into a development card buying frenzy and the rush was on (part of this was my own fault, at one point I bought a lumber and brick for 5 wheat instead of trading with the bank for one of those). I managed to get myself up to 8 points (with 2 hidden VPs) and was ready to win the game by upgrading to a city, when Michelle rolled an 8 to get the cards she needed for a settlement and won the game with 10 points. This was her first career Catan win.

We weren’t quite ready to be done with game night and Bobby & Jon were still aching for a win, so we broke out Coloretto and had it. Coloretto is a simple set collecting game where you score points for the more cards you have of any color. However, you are only allowed to count 3 different colors as positive points, the rest are negative so it’s a neat little game. Bobby and I fought most of the game and it seemed Jon got the short end of the stick every round. The game ended up close with Bobby winning with 28 points. I finished 2nd with 27, Michelle in third and Jon came in a close last.

All in all it was a great time.

Hope to see all of you next time, and those who missed out, we’d love to have you.