Game Night

An article by Don Quixote    No Comments

Game night turned into a huge T & E fest.

While Jim was missed (thus keeping us from having two games going on at the same time), we managed to squeeze in two plays.

The first round battle was joined by Tim, Brian, Bobby & Jon, while I played cube master and rule book guy.

Tim dug in well to the upper right hand corner of the board, Bobby took the upper left, Jon camped just below the river to Tim’s South and Brian setup his kingdom in the middle (hoping to the deploy the Soulliere Central Attack).

Tim decide to strike first and hit Jon hard to the south, however Tim under estimated his attack strength as well the order in which the battles should be resolved. As a result Jon took the first battle and shattered Tim’s well developing kingdom. The rest of Tim’s leaders fell quickly and left Jon sitting on the high ground.

The growing menace to the east was enough to cause Brian to go into panic mode (which I have no idea why he only had his blue leader out and waited nearly a 1/3 of the game before finally deciding to bring his king into play). As a result Brian broke out a disaster tile and arbitrarily dropped it somewhere in Jon’s kingdom in an effort to keep him from getting the southern most treasure. To Brian’s credit that did indeed keep Jon from going after that treasure and it remained undisturbed the rest of the game.

A battle began to brew in the north as Bobby’s kingdom started to expand in a strong sweeping black cloud towards the center.

Tim began to piece his kingdom back together slowly capturing small ground through out the area as well as causing internal strife within Jon’s solid right hand corner.

Brain seemed to forget every that he had learned from his last win and seemed to be lashing out at all the kingdoms around him like a pinwheel of death. However, the only destruction that Brian seemed to bring was to his own people.

The maelstrom had been delayed as long as it could and battles began to erupt from all sides. More disaster tiles fell breaking and re-breaking long standing empires. A feeding frenzy began over a monument that Bobby had created in the north central plains.

But the end of the game Tim had managed to completely dislodge Jon from his mighty throne, but sadly it proved to be too little too late.

The first game went to Jon, followed by Tim, Bobby and Brian.

My initial thought was to move on to something else, but the group was hungry for another playing.

This time Brian decided to sit out and be cube master (though as he got involved in watching the game unfold – and rooting on others to destroy me I might add – he started to neglect some of his duties).

So Jon, Tim, Bobby and I headed once more into the breach so to speak.

After all the trash talk and advice I offered before, during, and after the last game (as well as my avid playing of this game online) I knew that I was a target right away. So I made sure I played a very clean game.

I don’t have as detailed account of this game as I did the first one because I was involved in it. A lot of my free time was spent taking a look at my tiles and what I needed to do to get what I wanted.

One of the keys to T & E is to know when to loose a battle. Sometimes its in your best interest to loose and make another person waste titles where they don’t need to; because in the end, it can come down to just 1 cube between a win and a lost.

That’s how this game broke down. After some powerful battles and Tim having to step out at 9:30 things went down to the wire.

I managed to pull out the win with a score of 9 – 9 – 9 – 9 and Bobby came in second with an 8 – 8 – 9 – 9. Tim and Jon both tied at 5 with Tim having the edge over Jon.

If you’re a board gamer and you haven’t sunk your teeth into this game you really need to give it a try.