Game Night

Game Night came to E.B.G.G. on Friday and boy did the chips fly.

I’m part of two gaming groups, one that meets every other Monday at my house, and one that meets every 3rd Friday at various locations. There is some over lap between the two groups (Mark and Brian, you know who you are), but for the most part they are two different groups of people, and that’s a great thing.

I love gaming against different groups because it makes me a better player, it helps me think differently, consider the personal mechanics of such a social activity, it makes me uber.

But this past Friday worlds collided and Game Night (the Friday group) met at my house.

We had a blast.

Mark, Brian, Jon, Bobby, Rob, Tom and myself all joined in an evening of brownies, beer and board games. Okay, so the only beer was root beer, but I liked the alliteration of it all.

We couldn’t decide if we should play together as a group of if we should split into two groups. Personally I don’t care, but I don’t want anyone to feel slighted or left out so we decided to play a game of TransAmerica to decide.

Most of us were old hat with TA, but we gave an overview of the rules to Tom and Rob so they’d feel up to speed.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve described TransAmerica before, but for those of you at home who haven’t kept up, the game is very straight forward.

Each player has 5 different cities that they need to connect to. Cities are broken down by color based on their geographic location so everyone gets a city on the east coast, and everyone gets a city on the west coast (and all points in between). You goal is to make sure that all your cities are connected by rail.

On your turn you get to place to pieces of track (crossing rivers and mountains require two pieces to cross, so that’s turn if you have to lead the way). You are only allowed to add to your track network. However, once two networks are connected, you can build from that one as well (since technically its now your network as well).

The first player to connect all their cities wins the rounds. All other players move down the track of doom (not the official name) one space for every track piece they miss their connections by.

Most rounds end with a majority of players being one or two pieces away, but there are some times when you get bitten on the buttocks (just ask Jon) and take a hit of 6 or more.

Quite a few players took the drive in this game (including Mark, Brian, and I think Tom). Rob and Jon ended just spaces away while somehow I managed to have progressed only two spaces (which means I won most of the rounds).

Thankfully Bobby showed up and that made our decision even easier, we’d go ahead and break into groups.

However, just when we thought the decision was made, Mark suggested that we break out TurfMaster with the Course Collection.

Always a sucker for a horse race, we agreed and jumped right in.

However we made Mark promise to show us how to use the steeples (not to be confused with meeples) if we played. Now, some of you have played TurfMaster, the rest of you have been bored by my previous descriptions, so I won’t got into labored details.

But I will say this, steeples are evil.

Don’t believe me? Mark, Brian, and myself all lost our horses to those dreadful bushes. This is the way it works, each steeple takes 4 spaces to cross, 3 for the bush and 1 to land on the other side. If your moment ends on the steeple your horse breaks his leg, if your horse cannot land on the other side because it is blocked by a horse (or the horses tail) then your horse breaks his leg. The only exception to that rule is if it is a dice round, in which your horse just bumps into the bush and you’re good for another round.

Because of the course we chose it was a 4 leg race with the last leg being the steep round.

Jon was a machine.

He took the first leg and nabbed an easy 50 points, and then turned around and took the second race to bring his total up to 80.

The next too get a little muddy as my horse was almost run off the track on more than one occasion. In the end though it came down to the wire with Tom and Brian in position to stop Jon if they could just keep him from finishing and one of them win the race.

However, most of the horses ran out of gas at the end and Jon stole the game. Tom and Brian finished in 2nd and 3rd, Bobby and Rob in 4th and 5th, Mark 6th with 30 points and I finished last with 20. It was a rough day for horse racing, but a great time was had by all.

From there we decided to break up into two groups.

Brian drafted Mark and Rob, and I snagged Tom, Jon and Bobby.

Brian decided that his group was going to play Colossal Arena and I choose Santiago.

I cannot speak to who Brian’s game went but I know that he was cheering at the end and celebrating in his victory.

Now just to make things interesting, I managed to convince Mark to do two games at once and join us for Santiago. It seems my ploy worked because Mark lost both games.

I’m becoming a fan of Santiago more and more each time I play it. The game is simple, straight forward and filled with wonderful choices to be made.

The game ended very close with Tom making a strong push in the final rounds. I snagged first with 80 points, Tom 75, Mark 72, and Jon and Bobby fell in behind. This one will hit the table again. I am sure that if Mark wasn’t distracted will killing Brian’s Titan in the other game he would have made a larger grab for first.

Bobby had to take off at that point and head home (work in the morning) and the rest of us closed out the evening with a game of Cloud 9.

Mark, feeling the sting of his losses in Colossal Arena and Santiago decided to make a break for the finish line and took off… well, like a hot air balloon.

One of the interesting things that we found out is that the wild cards were being played wrong. A wild card, when used, fills the requirement for the entire hop regardless of the number of cards. Additionally the playing of your wild card is mandatory.

This really changed things up a bit as you had to worry about the wild card now at every turn (or count on it at every turn).

The game came down to the final round and Mark shot ahead to 54 points. I managed to make at 25 point hop, but it was too little too late and ended up with 53 points. Everyone else floated somewhere in between.

It was a great evening and a good time was had by all.