August 16, 2005 |
Lotsa folk showed up for the Tuesday night session, as Jamie was eager to give Karla some Michigan blueberries, Annie didn't have school, and devotees Lee and Scott made it. Scott even brought a game to play.
| Verräter...C'mon, Karla, it's not that hard! Ah, screw it! |
The game suffers from the "In the Shadow of the Emperor" problem: it's not very intuitive. It's hard to pick up the ebb and flow of the game, and big scoring turns take big investments. I'll have to pick my crowds for this one more carefully...
| Bang! |
| Results | ||||
| Player | Role | Character | Place | First Time? |
| Karla | Outlaw | José Delgado | (Won) Lived | |
| Lee | Outlaw | Paul Regret | (Won) Lived | |
| Jamie | Outlaw | Bart Cassidy | (Won) Lived | |
| Dan | Renegade | Chuck Wengar | (Lost) Lived | |
| Scott | Deputy | Jourdannais | (Lost) Lived | |
| Annie | Sheriff | Pédro Ramírez | (Lost) 2nd Killed | |
| Mike | Deputy | Apache Kid | (Lost) 1st Killed | |
Notes: Scott's got company this weekend to he bought a game that he thought might distract the troops. He bought Bang! and its second expansion, Dodge City, which really just adds a bunch more cards plus a group of "green" cards that you save until you want to use them. Felt pretty much like the same old game.
I liked my guy, the Apache Kid. When Annie started her policy of "I don't know who the bad guys are, so I'll shoot Mike, because Dan is too far away," she used a Diamond card Bang! on me that had no effect. It didn't matter, because the dynamite I had lit blew up on me anyway.
After that, as you can imagine, I got bored, and after the disgrace of Verräter, I was kind of like, "Tonight Sucks!" So I sulked, waited 15 minutes for the game to end (it didn't), looked up how the new cards worked and re-explained how the old cards worked, then went off to the living room to read some Usagi Yojimbo.
During the 15 minutes I stayed there, not much happened. Shots were traded, especially between Lee and Dan, with Jamie shooting at Lee, too. Lee was almost dead for a while there at the beginning. He survived, though, and Karla and Jamie stocked up on weapons and supplies before shooting at Annie, whittling her down to 2 for a while. Dan and Scott had an uneasy truce that ended with the game. I had only read a few pages of Usagi when I heard Jamie yell, "Is the game over? The Sheriff's dead!" Yeah, the game was over.
| Bohnanza |
| Results | |||
| Player | Score | Place | First Time? |
| Dan | 12 | 1 | |
| Mike | 11 | 2 (Tie) | |
| Jamie | 11 | 2 (Tie) | |
| Annie | 10 | 4 | |
| Scott | 9 | 5 | |
| Karla | 8 | 6 | |
| Lee | 6 | 7 | |
Notes: Next up was Bohnanza, because more people wanted to play that than 6 Nimmt! Jamiesaid he had only played it once, and I was still in grumpy land from the premature ending of Verräter and my instant death in Bang! Still, once we started playing Bohnanza, I got into it.
Dan, as always, complained about getting hosed, and Lee kept trying to make deals that were outrageous. Annie wanted a chili bean, and Lee said he'd give her a chile for 3 wax and a green bean. Everyone always laughed at his deals. They got more reasonable after a while, but they were too complicated. Say, I'll give you a green and a black-eyed bean but I need 2 wax and a blue. This doesn't sound confusing, but it was, because the person was usually offering something like 1 coffee and 1 wax.
There was a lull in the middle, where 4 people were collecting green beans. Dan made a couple killings off of Soy, and I made an immediate big return on Reds, getting 4 gold for them. Jamie was doing okay with several different beans. From midgame on, I sold smaller fields of Stink, Chili, Green, and Wax, made a large collection of coffee, and then hoped to get one more turn.
It never happened. Scott got the last turn (barely), and we counted our gold. No one had a 3rd bean field - they're really hardly worth it in a 7 player game, as you get so few turns anyway, and there are so many people to trade with. Lee's early offers came back to haunt him (he was also one of the midgame Green bean collectors, which didn't help). Karla didn't do so hot. She wasn't trading too much.
I did fine, but I should have (perhaps) traded a bit more midgame. Annie did fine, as did Jamie and myself, but Dan eked us out. He went for big collections (Soy, Wax, Coffee, netting him 11 of his 12 points), where I went for a lot of small ones (Chili for 1, Stink for 1, Green for 1, Coffee for 3, Red for 4, Soy for 1, more Green for 1). Scott's final trading round was interrupted mid-turn, but he and Jamie had vain hopes of starting Blue and Coffee bean fields (respectively) from scratch to get just one more coin. It wouldn't have happened, fellas.
Dan pulled out the victory by 1.
| Saboteur |
| Results | |||
| Player | Score | Place | First Time? |
| Annie | 7 | 1 (Tie) | |
| Scott | 7 | 1 (Tie) | |
| Jamie | 5 | 3 (Tie) | * |
| Lee | 5 | 3 (Tie) | * |
| Dan | 3 | 5 | |
| Mike | 1 | 6 | |
| Karla | 0 | 7 | |
Notes: Given the choice between 6 Nimmt! and Saboteur, the group went for Saboteur. With 7 people, 3 of the 8 cards are Saboteurs, which made the game much more Sabotaged. The saboteurs won two of three.
In the first round the good dwarves got their hats handed to them. Dan, Annie, and Jamie kept us all from going anywhere, though Scott managed to connect to the top gold nugget. Unfortunately, the nugget was at the bottom, where we had no chance of getting.
In the second round, with cards winding down, Scott, Annie, Jamie, Lee, and I were able to defeat only two saboteurs, Karla and Dan, with a few cards left, though it was still pretty tough. I told everyone with just a few cards left, that the middle one was NOT the gold. There was some controversy over this. Should I be able to say that? Everyone got grumpy for a second. Scott finished the connection and got 4 gold, leaving Lee with 2 and everyone else with 1.
In the third round, Mike's groundbreaking strategy of telling everyone info came to haunt the good guys, as his info helped Saboteurs Annie, Scott, and Lee slow us down. Near the end, Scott was killing us with dead ends. I had great cards, but I was hit with a broken cart. The saboteurs not only kept laying dead ends, they had all the avalanches, they kept our equipment broken, AND they were somehow able to fix each other's (or their own) equipment all the time! It was crazy. They must have cheated. Still, we fought our way to within two cards of the gold nugget before we were halted by a final dead end card played by Scott. I had hoped Jamie would play the broken pick axe on Scott (as Lee had been reduced to merely discarding), but he played it on Lee.
As Scott was about to put down the dead end card that meant our demise, Karla said to him, "Don't make me hate you!"
Scott said, "It didn't matter, I had a repair card" (again! Cheaters, I tell you!), but as Annie was fixing her equipment that turn, it would have given me, Karla, and Jamie (Dan had broken stuff) one last chance to connect, as I had excellent cards...I just didn't have the chance to get it out there.
Oh, well. We added up the scores, and Annie (who won all three rounds) and Scott took home the victory.
Karla was really grumpy because she didn't do so hot in the last two games. Lee said, "I don't know about this game," Jamie liked it, Dan agreed with Lee, and Karla said she didn't like it, either.