E.B.G.G. – Ellen Edition

Let the madness begin.

So I took the weekend off to go to a concert and spend some time with the boys; Michelle finally finished all her work for the semester and I was facing a 7 day stint at the Journal. With all this in mind, Michelle and I decided on Sunday night that perhaps having game night on Monday wasn’t such a good idea; besides Jon was the only one who RSVP’ed a yes.

So the first thing I do after I get the paper online is send out an email canceling that evenings gaming.

Within 15 minutes I had an email from Mark and Ellen letting me know that Ellen was shaking her fist at me shouting “Curse you Bob!” The first game night that she can stay late (since she doesn’t have school in the morning) and I had to go and cancel it. So I gave it some thought, called Michelle and we were both feeling better than we had the night before. To add to the mix, I had to be on call for the University until 10:00 p.m. anyway, so meh, why not?

So game night was back on, this time as a special request edition.

Considering the on again, off again nature of this evening, I had no idea who was going to show up or not show up. So once we got a few players there we launched in.

Mark, Ellen, Jon and myself decided to break out the new version of Carcassonne and see what it was all about.

Carcassonne: The City:

In my honest opinion (IMHO), nothing beats the original Carcassonne. It’s beautiful, simple, straight forward and frankly a lot of fun. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy all the little extras that they’ve added over the years. I like the River, the little extra scoring options, but there is something special about the original that just hasn’t been captured by all the new things.

Such is the case with Carcassonne: They City. There are lots of additional ways to score, markets, towers, walls, and the like. The box is wow, the pieces are wow, but it just doesn’t have the simplicity that I fell in love with.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a great game, lots more ways to hose your neighbor, ways to score and lots and lots of wooden pieces and if you’re a fan of Carcassonne, you know you’re going to get a copy anyway, so you might as well go head and order a copy now.

The setup is unique in that the tiles are sorted into 3 piles of 30, 25 and 20. All players draw from the same pile, once the first one is exhausted (the 30 tile pile), then players move into the second one.

This is when things break away from the traditional type scoring of Carcassonne. Once a player triggers any sort of scoring, it’s time to place walls. Each player extends the wall by one piece and has an opportunity to place a guard on the wall. The way this scoring works is that for every blue building in their row that they over look they score two points; for every named building (historic) they score 3 points. So if you get the right row you can score a lot of points. Additionally whoever triggered the scoring gets to place a tower piece; for every wall segment between this tower and the last they score a point.

Once players move to the 3rd pile, each player gets to place TWO wall segments instead of one.

The game ends when either all the tile are placed, the walls are within 5 spaces of each other, or I believe all the wall pieces have been placed.

Typical end game scoring ensues.

Since all of us were old hacks at Carcassonne we jumped right in and motored along. An alarming trend was seen early on, the YELLOW man was everywhere (Jon controlled yellow) and GREEN was sprouting in the strangest of places (Mark). Ellen (RED) and myself (BLUE) seemed to be just plotting along.

Towards the end game it just got ugly, I was lapped by both Jon and Mark and Ellen wasn’t too far behind. When we got to the final scoring it wasn’t even a contest. Jon broke 100 with Mark close on his heels. I managed to break 50 and Ellen ended up somewhere in the 60s or 70s. I was totally slaughtered but it was fun.

While we were playing Brian showed up. Apparently he thought Game Night was off, his wife knew better and apparently all but through him out of the house to go and play with us.

At this point we decided it was time to break out Pitch Car.

Pitch Car

I think we’ve discussed Pitch Car before, but if not, here’s the skinny. You build a large wooden track. You flick little wooden disks around it. Whoever completes 3 laps first wins.

For our two games, it was Mark, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

Michelle and Brian both joined us for this game and we rolled for starting position and the game was on. Mark, Brian and Jon seemed to take off to an early start while I was having problems getting my flicker going. Michelle and Ellen had some starting problems as well.

Somewhere in the middle of lap 1, things broke down.

Brian spent 8 (and that’s not an exaggeration) consecutive turns flicking his car off the track on a straight away. It’s been quite a while since I’ve laughed that hard.

Mark killed us all and ended the game before Brian could finish his first lap (which ended in heart break just before crossing the finish line).

We decided that we would break out the Pitch Car expansion and try some chicanery and the jump that is included.

The jump turned out to be tougher that you would think since it wasn’t made very well (both by the company and myself) so it was more than likely that you car would flip over on landing and cost you a turn. To make things even more fun, we put the two chicanes right next to each other and it created a rather interesting back up.

Mark had to start at the back of the pack, both because of his previous win and because of his poor dice rolling. But there was no stopping him. He managed to again pull ahead of the pack and dominate the race. Perhaps Mark was a bully in his younger days and perfected his flicker on the back of people’s ears on the bus, but whatever it is, the man can fling little wooden disks like nobody’s business.

Pick Picknic

With Pitch Car packed away it was time to get into something just as light but were the rest of us had a chance to win.

Pick Picknic is a simple game where you are trying to get the fattest chickens by eat the best food, and the fattest foxes by eating the biggest chickens.

There are 6 types of poultry (I forget them all), that range in value as well as several foxes per each type of poultry. At the beginning of the round the feed yards are seeded with food at random. Yellow cubes are worth 3, blue 2 and green 1.

Players then reveal at the same time which yard they are going to eat at. This is done by playing a matching poultry card. If you’re the only foul in the yard you eat like a bit and get to take all the cubes. If you’re not, then you have to work things out among yourselves. You can either divide them or fight for them. If you fight for them you each roll one dice and add the total to the value on your poultry card. Whoever has the highest value wins all the food.

However, you’re not the only eating game in town. If a fox shows up, then your chickens don’t get to eat all, they instead become the meal. If two foxes show up they too have to duke it out to see who gets to eat and who goes home hungry.

Once all the cubes are placed the game ends. Whoever has the highest score between feed and foxes wins.

This is a great all age game. Its fast, fun and easy to play. I believe that Mark won the first game and Jon (which Michelle a close second) one the last game.

A good time was had by all.

At this point C.Ray and Andrea showed up and Mark and Ellen had to make their way home so we decided to break out a bigger game.

Robo Rally

We choose Robo Rally.

In retrospect, pulling our Robo Rally at 9:30 at night probably wasn’t the wisest decision we could have made, but C.Ray REALLY wanted to play it so, hey, why not.

Robo Rally is a great game. Why Wizards of the Coast every let this game go out of print is beyond me. Basically this game is simply a test of your programming skills. Players have control of a robot that they are trying to get from point A to point B and void getting crushed in a canner or shoved into a pit along the way.

At the beginning of your turn each player is dealt 9 programming cards. They are all randomized so you never know what you are going to get. They range in commands from TURN LEFT, TURN RIGHT, MOVE 1, 2, or 3, U-TURN, and move BACKWARDS.

You then have to program the correct sequence to get your robot where you want it to go. To make things interesting is that other robots can bump into you and the game board environment moves. Gears turn, conveyor belts move, and lasers fire. As we all leaned it sucks when you are one space off and your robot gets pushed to its death.

The best part was that Jon got every turn left card in the game and spent his turns making his robot dizzy.

End the end though it was getting late and we had to call the game at 10:30 with Brian and I being the only two players to make it through the 2nd check point.

All in all in was a great time.

Enjoy your Andrew Peterson Christmas CDs and Michelle and I will see you all next year!