1.
With 9 players in attendance we split into 2
tables and played some longer games. Table 1 played “THUNDERSTONE
ADVANCE”, the new game which was played last week. This time round Freya
demonstrated her knowledge of the game by scoring a resounding victory with 40
points total, whilst the other 4 players scores were in the 20’s.
2.
Table 2 saw Jeremy leading a group of 4 in the
game of “MACAO”, by Stefan Feld, who
is a rising designer with many fine titles to his credit. The game is about
acquiring various commodities from Macao and shipping them to the appropriate
cities on the board that require them and gaining Prestige Points (PP’s) for
doing so. When they select a district to pick up goods they place one of their
markers on it and if they can link to adjacent districts they will score PPs at
the game end. Players can also ‘buy’ PPs if they have sufficient gold coin to
do so via a market conversion table that changes for each of the 12 rounds in
the game. Another way to gain PP’s is via the action cards that a player can
acquire. To do any of this requires a variable amount of small coloured cubes,
which come in 6 colours and the way these are gained is achieved in a most
ingenious way, which I will attempt to describe. Each player has a ‘shipping wheel’ in their
employ, which is made up of 7 segments, containing the dice symbols 1-6, plus
one with a large red arrow, which indicates the Action section. As part of the
turn one player throws the 6 coloured six-sided dice and each player then
chooses to action 2 of these dice
and place that number of coloured cubes against the appropriate numbered
segment which is currently displayed, so you might choose a 3 Red and a 5 Green.
You will be choosing colours that might enable you to ‘buy’ tiles in Macao or
to action some of your cards in your tableau. When all players have done this
the ‘shipping wheel’ is rotated one space so the Red Arrow now
points to say the ‘1’ space, and those are the cubes the player has at their
disposal this turn. So you can see that you have to plan ahead for the cubes
you want in future turns when selecting which dice to action. In our example
above the 3 Red will NOT be
available for another 2 turns, the 5 green for 4 turns. Cubes that are
available are used to gain commodities, if they match, to gain cards, to turn
into Gold coin, to move your ship to the cities, to move your player marker
further up the turn order, so plenty to think about. If you have no
action cubes in the Red Arrow segment you are penalised -3 PP’s; the same
applies if you have filled your tableau with 6 unactioned cards and therefore
cannot place a new one. So in this way we tried to achieve our desired moves.
Mike took an early lead by acquiring 5 Gold Coin which he converted into 8 PPs.
The others concentrated on getting useful cards which linked together to build
a useful ‘engine’ for later on. Paul then started to move up the PP track with
the first delivery of commodities, plus he had actioned cards which granted him
a bonus for a particular commodity type. Kevin and Mike battled to gain linked
segments in the north of Macao, with Mike frustrated by going last in the Turn
Order and the tile he wanted being snatched by Kevin. This all helped Jeremy
who was building a nice portfolio of commodities in the south of Macao, which
he eventually shipped and gained lots of PPs. All players apart from Mike saw
their ‘engines’ come good in the latter stages, so they forged ahead leaving
Mike behind. Jeremy and Paul tussled for the lead, with Kevin closing quickly
but Jeremy had enough conditions met at game end to gain a clear victory, with
the final scores being Jeremy 70; Paul 55; Kevin 46; Mike 35. The game took
nearly 3 hours but all the players thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it to
other members.
3.
Table 1 reduced to 4 players so they played
“DOMINION“, a club favourite, in
which Roger won by a single point from Jerry.
4.
On Table 2 Kevin decided to leave as it was
10.15 so the 3 remaining players played “SORBEK”,
a set-collecting card game with a neat scoring twist. From a large deck of
cards several are placed along the banks of the Nile and in turn players can do
one of the following. 1) take the first card into their hand; 2) take a card
further along the Nile into their hand but place all the intervening cards
into their ‘corruption pile’. 4) Lay
down a set of at least 3 matching cards for round end scoring and select one of
the bonus tiles for doing so. (see later) 4) Play a character card from their
hand and action it. This sometimes involves stealing a card from another
player, or taking more cards with out penalty or some other such event too
numerous to mention here. When the deck is exhausted the round ends and scoring
takes place as follows. All undeclared cards are added to the
corruption pile. Then each declared set is scored as the number
of scarabs on the cards times the number of cards in the set…say typically 3 x
5 for 15 points. Some of the Bonus tiles now get actioned. These can send a
nominated player back along the scoring track to the next symbol matching where
they currently stand. The opposite tile enables a player (usually themselves)
to advance up the scoring track to a symbol that matches where they are. Some add 2 to the
number of cards in another player’s corruption
pile and this is where it gets nasty, as all the players add up their
number of cards in the corruption pile and the player with the highest
total has to move backwards on the scoring track. The number of points
they scored that round is divided by 10 to get a result, i.e. 42 points = 4. They then move back past 4 of the yellow coloured sections on
the track, these being set at 5 point intervals. So it pays not to put too many
cards in your corruption pile. We only had time for 2 rounds and the final
scores were Paul 68; Jeremy 55, Mike 45. A good little filler.
Games played and Winners
were:
Thunderstone
Advance – Freya Freestone;
Macao – Jeremy Hurault;
Dominion – Roger
Skull;
Sorbek – Paul
Bulpin.
