games day

[cellio]

We had half a dozen people over for an afternoon and evening of board games today. On Thursday it looked like we would have somewhere between 6 and 14 people; we ended up with 8 gamers and one extra for dinner. That's a good number -- small enough to be managable but large enough to support more than one game (and, thus, variety).

Dani wanted to try Runebound again with the optional rules to speed up the game. There were four players, and it still took about six hours, same as the six-player game that was Dani's first exposure to the game and the two-player game that was my first exposure. (He and I later played a two-player game with all the speed-up rules, and it took four hours.) I diselieve the claim on the box that it can be played in two hours. Maybe we're just not the right sort of gamers; I also think of Titan as a 12-hour game, but Origins schedules it in 6-hour slots, I understand.

Meanwhile, the other four of us set out to play Iron Dragon. (We had thought Iron Dragon and Runebound would consume comparable amounts of time, and then we'd swap players around and play other games.) This was kind of a bizarre game for me. First off, I won, which almost never happens. (I like this class of train games, but I'm not usually good at them.) Second, we finished in three hours, and the rule of thumb is one hour per player. And third, the "endgame" phase, where you're just moving around racking up the money, was pretty short.

Geographically this one was also strange for me. I ended up mostly running back and forth from the old world (eastern edge of the board) across the north to the northwest corner and back, visiting the central part of the continent rarely and the southwest not at all. I made a single foray into the underworld, renting track to go in and building on my way out to connect the city down there.

After that we played El Grande, which is stylistically (and maybe actually; I don't know) a German game. The game has nine rounds; after every three you score. You start with a set of (single-use) numbered cards with which to bid for turn order in each round, so part of the strategy is deciding when to spend the high-value cards. What you're bidding on with the cards is not just play order but action cards; candidates are turned up at the beginning of each round, right before bidding. The bid cards and the action cards, in addition to their primary functions, affect the number of pieces you can put into play. It's an optimization problem with variables (the other players). I was losing through the first half of the game, started to get the hang of it mid-game, and ended up in second place. The winner was way ahead of the rest of us; he's good, and he's also played more.

We used TransAmerica as our "wait 15 minuts and check again" game, at the beginning while waiting for people to arrive and around dinner time when we were waiting for things to cook. I had an unusually-good day, winning, I think, about half the games of it that we played.

Food quantities worked out fine. We had some chicken left (since we were a few down from the maximum number of people who could have shown up), but it'll get eaten tomorrow. Tossed salad was more popular than coleslaw; I probably don't need to bother with the latter next time. (For some reason I had predicted the reverse.) People seemed somewhat mystified by hulvah; I thought Dani had fed this to the gamers before. My oven is too darn small; two pans of breaded chicken, one pan of wings (all of these pans are about 9x12), and one cookie sheet of rolls fit only by applying compression and using the third dimension -- bah.

After dinner some people played a five- (or six-?) player game of Settlers of Catan. I am told that we need new dice; these ones weren't producing the numbers people wanted. :-) I was gamed-out by then, so I chatted with lorimelton and wanderingpixie while the others played.