January 21, 2006 |
| Settlers of the Stone Age |
| Results | |||
| Player | Score | Place | First Time? |
| Lee | 10 | 1 | |
| Jamie | 4 | 2 (Tie) | |
| Mike | 4 | 2 (Tie) | |
Notes: Normally, I really enjoy Settlers games. And, despite Lee kicking the absolute crap out of us, I enjoyed this game, too (though Jamie and I complained a lot and didn't totally unite against Lee until very late - not that it did much good).
I guess I enjoy the process of playing this game more than the others. It stinks to get screwed a lot, and I hate waiting forever while the leader builds about 4 things in his turn, but other than that, I enjoy building and planning and doing things.
Now, how did Lee kick our asses? I came up with a couple reasons. #1, the 7's came up in odd bunches, and the Neanderthal usually sat on Jamie's or my own spaces for big chunks of the game. When we would (finally!) put a marker on Lee, he would just move it using the Hunting track. Which leads to #2: Lee had a huge advantage in flint early on, so he was able to get a foundation quickly. Also, though everyone was short on bone (especially after Jamie killed off the 6 Bone space in Africa with a desert, ruining any chance I had to catch up to Lee), Lee was frequently trading in 3 flints for 1 bone.
Jamie was especially short on bone, and he was too quick to get exploration chips, foregoing a chance to create a campsite. Lee had a lot of flint in part due to good luck - he had two campfires on the 5 - Flint space and we rolled a lot of 5's. But the main thing was that Lee had tons of flint throughout and wasn't impeded by the Neanderthal. As Jamie and I couldn't acquire flint (usually because my 8 - Flint was covered and Jamie had no good source), we couldn't even reach the first space in the Hunting track to move the Neanderthal. Though even when we did, Lee was lucky enough to roll 7's on his next turn.
Finally, near the end, we managed to slow Lee down a bit, as his luck ran out. He probably almost beat us 10 to 2 to 2, but Jamie and I finally had a bit of fun, got some rolls, and I spent a lot of turns hosing Lee just to prolong the game. On my last turn I managed to catch up to Jamie's 4, and we ended in a tie. I had 4 campsites, and Jamie had 3 with an Adaptation Europe point. Lee had the Exploration and Diversification 2 pointers, 5 camps, and Adaptation Asia.
Jamie said he remembered the last game being much closer. Here's the link to see for himself:
| Lord of the Rings |
| Results | |||
| Player | Score | Place | First Time? |
| Mike (Frodo) | 60 | Lost | |
| Jamie (Pippin) | 60 | Lost | * |
| Lee (Sam) | 60 | Lost | * |
Notes: Next I wanted to try this one. I probably haven't played it (except solitaire) in close to two years. Dan's Mr. Grumpy about it, so I took advantage of his absence to expose Jamie and Lee with it.
I refused to make all the decisions, and we started with Sauron at 15 (in solitaire, I play him at 12). We started out fine, though Frodo was corrupted 3 spaces when I distributed the cards. After Rivendell (where I managed to get all the yellow cards), we had a bit of trouble in Moria, and Sam and Frodo took 3 and 2 points of corruption. We held off on summoning Gandalf, though, and took our lumps. We used a lot of our double cards.
After Lothlorien we tackled Helm's Deep beautifully. We finished friendship to get the Eomer (or Theoden?) card, and we finished Travelling in time to get the other bonus. After that we coasted through the scenario, and Lee and I were only corrupted one point each. I thought we were in good shape for the final two scenarios.
We were, actually. We zipped through Shelob's Lair, though we again started having trouble getting all the tokens we needed. Sam had the ring and probably should have put it on near the end (where all those black squares are), and when he used Gollum to advance he had to roll the die three times. I used Mithril to prevent one roll and the other yellow card to stop another roll. A bit banged up, we headed for Mordor, but Sauron was now at space 11, and we were all way too close to him. Sam was at 10, Frodo 8, and Pippin 9.
Mordor was difficult and we ran through all the rest of our Gandalfs. First, we moved Sam back two spaces (though Pippin was the ring bearer). Then, we used the no-event marker. We were going through the events pretty quickly. After that, we had Sam re-sort the top three tiles via Gandalf. We were slowly getting some traveling done, but we were limited in cards, so we made forays through Friendship and Hiding to get some more cards. I was particularly short on cards, so I had to usually draw. Sam used his Lembas to draw back up to 6 cards, and, though we were completely beaten up, we managed to get to Mt. Doom.
We were short on tokens, though. I only had 1, as did Sam, and I ended up at space 9 while Sam was at 11 - the same as Sauron. Pippin also was completely corrupted and he was gone. I was the last hope. As I was two spaces away and had no cards, the two-card roll and the advances of 2 or 3 would kill me. The other three rolls would let me survive to destroy the ring. I rolled the advance three, and decided to be corrupted rather than destroy the One Ring.
It was pretty cool, and though I would probably have made different decisions at other points - decisions I let Lee and Jamie make on their own - it was fun almost to make it. We had some early rough luck at Moria and the going was really difficult in Mordor, but we flew spectacularly through Helm's Deep with little damage and with a lot of cards.
In fact, we all had a lot of cards in Shelob's Lair, and Lee thought the Lembas card (draw up to a total of 6 cards) was useless. Uh, no.
It's a fun, interesting game that I still enjoy a lot. Some folks who enjoy conflict and hosing (there's a guy at the Wednesday night MBG Group who LIVES for making clever hosing moves) won't like it, as the only way to hose people is to lose.
One final note: Jamie, who gets the Word-a-Day email, found out that Cob is an old English word for spider (like Cobwebs = Spiderwebs), and that Lob is, too. (Like Lobster is some spider-ster) What that means is that Tolkien, in his nigh-infinite wisdom, named the evil spider queen She-Spider. Very cool.