The Non-Euclidian Staircase

I showed up a little early, so Eric and I decided to try out Robber Knights, which I'd been bringing for a while but had never quite made the table. It's a game I'd wanted to try since picking it up at GenCon because I really couldn't tell how it worked. The game consists of playing tiles, some of which are open plains, lakes, or mountains, while others are villages, towns, or castles. Those last three are worth points to the player who claims them, and claiming is done by sending knights out when a castle is placed. The trick is that only the last knight claiming a tile matters. So there's lots of following other players' actions and trying to arrange blocking terrain as a defense. The first game featured Eric cleaning my clock, 35/20. While we were playing, Ray arrived, and as we were setting up a three-player follow-up, Jim arrived. So it was a four-player follow-up instead! At four players, there's a lot more options each turn, but also a near certainty that if you leave a weakness, someone will take advantage of it. So this game was much closer, and essentially came down to who was most careful and slow playing out their tiles. You see, you must play one each turn, but you can play as many as 3, and the game ends when every player is out of tiles, so the last player will get extra turns with no need for defensive play any longer. Eric was that player, with 3 or 4 tiles left when I ran out, so we ended up at 29/28/22/22. Games that close can't be bad, even if you don't come out on top.

We knew some others would be arriving soon, so we decided on a relatively quick game next. Eric pulled out his original Japanese Fairy Tale deck, offering another game I had read but never played. This is a tricky little game of scoring cards (which often work best in complex combinations), with an added trick from a drafting mechanism, where players are dealt a hand, but only keep one, passing the rest around the table. And repeat until you've taken 5 cards (2 from your original hand, the one you choose and the one everyone else rejects, plus one each from everyone else's). Then you play 3 cards, discarding the other two. 5 rounds are played, then whatever cards you have out (and still face up, as some cards force others to be flipped and thus taken out of scoring), you score. Somehow, everyone failed to notice that I was collecting several cards that fed each others scoring, even passing me just what I wanted even in the last round. The scores reflect that lopsidedness, as I won 82/47/41/36, with most of my points coming from 8 cards, 4 that are worth 3 points each, and another 4 that are each worth 3 times the number of cards of the first type I had in play. So 60 points just from those! The rest were just gravy.

By now, Dave and Jon had arrived, as had a newcomer, Barbara. Eric proposed Around the World in Eighty Days, a game I'd read about but never played. Linda, Jon, and Barbara joined in. The game consists of playing cards (1, 2, or 3 based on the icons on the map) to move from city to city along the route of Verne's novel. Just which cards you play, and just which available card you take to refill your hand, decide how many days each step takes and what, if any, special effects you get to use. Barbara took the "race ahead, moving as quickly as possible" strategy, which is a good one. She ended up back in London 4 turns before the rest of us, and not too long past the 80 day "goal". Eric, meanwhile, lounged back a bit and took advantage of several "last player to arrive" bonuses to keep his score low. In the end, he and I were right beside one another... but thanks to a lucky draw on my last turn, I was 1 day quicker. Final score 74/75/85/89/X (due to bad luck drawing, Jon was still in New York when the game ended, unable to reach London to score).

To bring everyone together in a more social game, we brought out Time's Up. I had fun playing, but after a second play, I'm pretty sure Charades-style games are not my strong suit. The only thing Barbara and I had going for us in the end was consistency, scoring 6 points each round. But that put us in a very weak 3rd place in the 34/28/18/16 final score.

Ray had brought along Oasis, a game he'd apparently been trying to get onto the table for nearly a year, failing because he really wanted to play only at 5 players. I can understand why, though. Having read the rules but not played the game, I also suspected the game really only comes into its own at more players. We got a full table, with Matt, Jim, and Dave joining us. This game involves a very odd bidding style, where you offer cards from a stack you manage (but don't see until you flip them up in the act of offering them). Each turn, you try to attract the choice of the player with an early turn order marker (the #1 marker is extra good because it gives an extra bonus), but you don't want to offer too much because it 1) enriches the other players too much and 2) drains your stack so you'll have less to offer next turn. Once you take cards, you trade them in for the right to either place tiles of 3 terrain types or camels on the board, add cards to your stack, or gather scoring tokens. Scoring tokens are associated with the terrains and the camels, and in the end your score is the product of the number of the appropriate tiles/camels and the associated scoring tokens. I took a strategy of ignoring one type completely and focusing on just 3, and that worked quite well. Unfortunately, I got more scoring tokens in my #2 tile type (rock) rather than my #1, camels, so I ended up in second to Ray, you got the right match. Still, it was very close, at 103/99/78/50/38. OK, very close for the two of us, at least.

Lots of fun, and I was mostly competitive (except for that first game of Robber Knights and Time's Up). Not a bad evening at all!