1. With
7 players again tonight we started with a card game called “Pick Pick Nic”, a lightweight game about chickens feeding in one
of the 6 meadows in the game. Players secretly play cards of the colours of the
meadows and the highest value played wins the food that is there, in cubes of
value 1, 2 or 3. However if another player plays a Fox card of that colour the
fox eats the chickens and they grab the grub. After each round of play the
meadows are refreshed with a cube placed in each one, and play continues until
all cubes have been placed and the player with the highest total value of cubes
won is the winner. The winner was Richard by 3 points.
2. The
same players then had another game of “Incan
Gold”, which is proving quite popular. This ended in a tie between Richard
and Chris, so they played on until a result was determined, and Chris was the
victor.
3. We
the split into groups of 3 and 4. The smaller group played “Euphrat & Tigris”, a highly-rated game about placing tiles and
counters to gain scoring counters in any of the 4 colours represented in the
game. Players can do 2 actions per turn, the actions being chosen from a list
of 4 possible types. As the board fills up conflicts will occur and territories
are lost or gained which brings in rewards or losses. Alistair and Mike battled
with each other to their detriment, leaving Geoff to build up a nice stock of
scoring counters and he won easily in the end. A great game, one to consider
playing again soon.
4. The
group of 4 played yet another top notch game in “Puerto Rico”. The game is about developing plantations and building
on your individual boards to produce goods such as indigo, corn, tobacco,
coffee and sugar and then to ship these back to the mother country by loading
them on ships in the harbour. To work the fields players employ colonists that
arrive at the start of each turn and place them as they wish. Each player then
chooses a role to play for that turn and uses this to add buildings, generate
products, sell for cash, load ships etc, a multitude of options being open to
the players. In a close finish Robert managed to win by just 2 points.
5. On
table 1 a quick filler game of “High
Society” was played whilst we waited for the other game to finish. This is
about players bidding cheques to buy the luxury goods on offer. They hope to gain the most prestige by having
the highest total of goods at the game end. However if they are the poorest
player at the end they are ‘shunned’ by society as they have ‘bought’ their way
to the top so they are eliminated. To spice things up a bit sometimes the cards
depict negative events such a Thief, Gambling Losses or Scandal, and the player
who drops out of the auction first receives these cards, and this is to be avoided
if possible. Good fun in a game that takes only 20 minutes to play and after
Alistair looked likely to win Geoff sneaked in the last few auctions to gain a
victory as Alistair was the joint poorest player with Mike so they were both
eliminated.
6. Then
we all came together for a 7-player version of “Turf Horse Racing”, the horse betting game which was played last
week. Alistair made the running for the first 3 races closely followed by Mike
but Richard had a storming race 4 and took a healthy lead into the final race
but he only just managed to repel a late challenge from Roger by just 1 point.
Final scores for the first 3 were 27.26 and 25
Games played and Winners were:
Pick
Pikc Nic Richard Piesse;
Incan
Gold Chris Cook;
Euphrat
& Tigris Geoff Williams;
High
Society Geoff Williams;
Puerto
Rico Robert Piesse.
Turf
Horse Racing Richard Piesse.
