November 8, 2005 |
| Ra |
| Results | |||
| Player | Score | Place | First Time? |
| Jim | 45 | 1 | * |
| Mike | 33 | 2 | |
| Dan | 32 | 1 | |
| Annie | 25 | 2 | |
| Lee | 12 | 1 | |
Notes: Karla didn't feel like playing tonight so I let her take a pass for the night. We played a kind of long game of Ra, which took a bit of time to explain the rules and had some tough choices for me, Lee, and Jim.
I was the big Ra invoker, which always upsets everybody. I had a pretty good first round, getting Lee, with the 16 tile, to bid on something that wasn't so great. Almost no Ra tiles showed up, so Jim and Dan greeded it up big time, and though Dan had fewest pharaohs and Jim had the most, he stayed alive thanks to 9 points in river tiles. I had 4 pharaohs, but Jim snagged one more to keep me from 5 points.
In the second round my tiles were 16, 2, and 3, so I tried to manipulate the system to get good stuff. Unfortunately, the Ra tiles came out like crazy, and before 2 auctions had been won 7 of the 10 spaces were filled. Jim was still getting what he wanted, though, and I managed to get a couple of things, Annie managded 3 civs, but Dan and Lee were mostly shut out. I was the only one with a flood tile, so I grabbed some extra points that no one else got. Had Dan managed a flood tile, he would have had another 10 or 11 points and may have challenged for the win at the end.
In the final round, Ra tiles again flooded the market, but all I had was the 2, 3, and 4 chips. I kept invoking Ra except in ugly situations, and when disasters appeared, I manipulated them so that I would get stuff. I did manage to get the best run of bidding chips for +5, but Jim had two particularly useful bids with his 5 chip and his 10 that netted him two gods, a civ, a flood, an extra pharaoh, and his seventh monument. About the only thing he didn't get was a three of a kind for one of his monuments.
Dan snagged a flood to amass 12 points in river points, and as I had to use my small tiles to avoid bad things happening to me (rather than actually getting good stuff), I couldn't really add to my points. Lee did poorly and suffered the final insult by having the fewest chip points. He blamed me for invoking Ra too much back when he had the 16 chip.
In the end, Dan was shocked that he was so close to me, and Jim's monopoly on the pharaohs helped propel him to an easy victory.
Early on, Lee asked me what the average victory total was, and I said, "About forty, with a standard deviation of twenty." We all laughed, but then Dan said, "That sounds about right..." Let the record show that Jim's winning total fell within the first standard deviation.
| Pirate's Cove |
| Results | |||
| Player | Score | Place | First Time? |
| Jim | 52 | 1 | * |
| Annie | 30 | 2 | |
| Lee | 27 | 1 | |
| Mike | 24 | 2 | |
| Dan | 20 | 1 | |
Notes: This stupid ass game gets my ass in trouble with Karla every time.
It was Jim's first time, so I explained the rules and how everything works and we started playing pretty quickly. Dan was blown out of the water pretty quickly and got pretty upset. Lee won two early battles (against Jim and Dan) and was pretty full of himself. I was sneaking off without any battles, and managed to get stuff the first few trips without battling. Jim lost battles his first two games and I wondered if he'd dislike this game, as it falls more on the Killer Bunnies side of the balance than the Blokus side.
But Jim quickly recovered and managed to get a pretty sweet ship. I was still doing well, and by turn 7 I had knocked Lee from his high horse by sending the Royal Navy after him, which kicked his ass and kept him from competing. Annie kind of trudged along, and Dan, after calling us all pussies about 80 times and trying to fight everyone, finally scored a point in turn 6 and started to make a nice comeback.
After turn 7 I think I netted a total of 3 points. First, I kept butting heads with Jim, whose ship was not only great (4 cannons, 4 crew plus Squire Trelawny's Parrot, who gives a +20 sail) but his luck was, too. He blew me out of the water with one shot (I had 4 cannons and 4 crew, too), but then missed Annie about six times before sinking her, taking not one hit of damage. Jim was amassing treasure and doubloons and points and we couldn't stop him.
Over the last 5 turns, I lost 4 battles, and only managed to survive the other one by using a card that let me head off to an empty island. With things pretty much staying even, in turn 11, Jim and I fought for another island. His wheel said Sail island whereas I had chosen Hull. "Yippee!" I thought. No dice. Jim insisted that he had really chosen Hull but the arrow moved when he set it down. Sigh. This time I used a six-gun salute and damaged his whole ship twice, only to get knocked out again. My only hope now lay in acquiring second place the next turn.
The bad news continued, though. Lee, Dan, and Annie were not going to go to treasure island in round 12, as the two women pirates, Anne Bonnie and Mary Read, were pretty tough. This left just Jim and me to face her. The feminine duo does damage to all parts of the ship but only attack with 3 dice. Jim had 4 hits everywhere before he'd go down, but I had only 2 on my hull. I probably don't need to tell you what happened but I will...
I also at this point managed to have Long John Silver's parrot, who allows you to roll 6 dice. I had gone to the bathroom and returned only to find the battle already in progress (Lee and Dan had fought a long, epic battle with Annie which Annie eventually won thanks not to her fighting prowess, but to crappy ships and bad rolls on the parts of Dan and Lee).
The pirates had already attacked Jim (and missed) and Jim had riposted, doing 1 point of damage. I damaged her twice on my six dice, then Lee rolled for the pirate ladies. Two hits and I was done. Lee hit me twice on three dice. I grumpily sat there, flicking my pieces around, wondering how I was going to keep my mouth shut and not complain.
Fate wasn't done with me. Lee then rolled about 5 more attacks for the two women, and Lee didn't hit Jim once. Not once. This meant that his parrot never got injured, and whereas I went down with one hit, Jim didn't even have to take a -1 fame point penalty. My incredibly bad luck resulted in me bitching like crazy, Lee and Dan laughing, and Karla telling me that I was being a jerk.
Had I survived that battle, something I figure I had a 78% chance of doing, I would have ended the game with 37 points to Jim's 49, and grabbed an easy 2nd. Instead, I bitched about my luck and got yelled at, to boot. Stupid game.