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two days of gaming
Tuesday we had six players. We started with Imperial, most of us for only the second time. I started out well but got scooped by other players in buying up the affordable stocks in emerging countries. (I had not realized until it was too late that you are allowed to buy multiple share tokens in a single country. I thought you could only have one, which you were free to upgrade. Oops.) The game ended in a tie, with the rest of us lagging somewhat behind.
We then played Settlers of Catan. I had reasonable positions (no one has good positions in a six-player game), but wood was scarce, hindering roads and settlements, and I ended up buying development cards several times for lack of alternatives. For the first time that paid off for me; in addition to largest army I had two victory points in those cards, winning (with one just-drawn VP to spare) on the turn I turned over the third soldier.
As an aside, we have the weirdest collection of playing pieces for Settlers I have ever seen. My original game came not with the usual red-blue-green-yellow pieces, but with purple, orange, white, and black. The expansion added green and brown. (The brown is very hard to see, especially if black is also in play.) I've played with other people's games and never seen this combination of colors before. It's weird. I would love to trade for some colors that are easier to see. Even though the expansion has other quirks (they changed the sizes of the cards -- so much for shuffling them in -- and the art on the tiles), the game is expensive enough that I'm not inclined to just buy fresh.
After Settlers and dinner we lost a player, so we played Puerto Rico. A five-player game feels pretty different than a four-player one -- much more resource-starved, and you're less likely to be able to do any particular action when it goes around the table. (For instance, people going late in production tended not to get all their goods, and of course at least one player will be shut out of the four-slot trading post.) I built a hacienda (auto-populate fields) early and always took corn when available (since it requires no populated processing plant), and built a wharf when I could (my own private ship during captain phase, to load all that corn onto). Coffee was my main source of money, but I never had enough to buy the large buildings until the very last turn (when I wouldn't have been able to populate it, and anyway another player went before me and grabbed the last one). I thought the lost victory points for buildings not built would hinder me, but I still won (with 60-some points!) so I guess that corn strategy worked.
We then lost another player, so we brought out Pandemic, teaching it to the one player who hadn't seen it before. We went straight to the normal game (skipping the beginner level), and had a mix of wins and losses. By then it was pretty late so we wrapped up.
Thursday we started with six players (including a child of the host). We were expecting two more imminently, so we played a round of Incan Gold, which ended in a tie. Our usually-prompt other players weren't there yet, so we called to find out that they'd flown back into town that morning and their plane had been delayed, so they'd be another couple hours. The child left and the five remaining played Pandemic with the expansion, which was new to all of us. The expansion adds some new roles (and edits one), adds some special-event cards, supports five players, and has some optional challenges. We played with one challenge; the owner of the game wanted to try playing the bio-terrorist, who (as you would expect) works against the otherwise-cooperative players, so we did that.
The bio-terrorist plays with a hand of infection cards and has fewer actions per turn, but he gets a turn after each other player. He also has his own private plague, so the other players have to cure five diseases and not the usual four. On his turn the bio-terrorist can infect a city that he is in (which reveals his position), infect a city he is not in by playing that city's infection card (diluting the infection discards), move regularly (walk/ferry), sabotage a research station (I think this uses a card; we didn't see it happen), draw a card, or use an infection card to fly into or out of the given city (playing the card reveals that he was sighted in that city's airport, though you don't know the direction of travel). There are rules for capturing the bio-terrorist (and he has escape rules), but we never saw that case. The bio-terrorist tracks his movement and actions with paper and pencil.
Curing the fifth disease (purple) requires the card for a purple-infected city and any four other cards, so there is a tension between leaving cities infected (to increase the chance of getting a useful card) and knocking down infections before they get out of hand (or you run out of purple cubes, losing the game). When a purple-infected city gets infected with its normal disease, though, it also picks up another cube of the special infection, so that's kind of dangerous. We only played one game; we were teaching the base game to one player and we were all learning the expansion, and our additional players arrived during the game. So we'll need to experiment more with the bio-terrorist and give the other challenges a try.
We now had seven potential players, though one was marginal (would either play or just hang out, having brought other stuff to do, depending on what we played). We ended up playing a six-player game of Merchant of Venus, which is basically a train game (of the crayon variety) in space -- no crayons but the board is semi-dynamic. Six players turns out to be pretty brutal; I started off, as fifth player, with two bad rolls leading to another player beating me to my destination both times, so I felt like I was behind, but I recovered mid-game and was on my way to a respectable position. However, another player had a commanding lead at that point over all of the rest of us, so we eventually just called it.
After that (and dinner) we split into two groups, with three people playing Pandemic (with expansion) and four playing Rum and Pirates. I was in the latter group. Rum and Pirates is a cute, fun game. When we finished the other group was still playing so we brought out San Juan, which I had never played before. This is a card game based on Puerto Rico; it has some simplifications and some changes and plays fairly efficiently once you get the hang of the mechanics. I would certainly play this again.
By then it was around 11:00 -- far enough from midnight to be worth doing something, but late enough that people were losing brain cells. So we brought out Trans America and had four players, one of whom had not played before. The game mechanic is simple and easily taught, though the player who was learning is also not all that into gaming, so might have benefited from some extra tutelage to avoid giving away so many victory points to other players. Ah well.
We hung around talking until it was time to count down the last ten seconds to midnight and drink champagne. Marking an arbitrarily-chosen boundary between one point in time and another on a human-constructed calendar doesn't matter all that much to me (I'm not sentimental about watching the numbers roll over), but it would have been silly to be there until almost midnight and then not hang around for a few more minutes. :-)
I think in the future I'm probably up for about 1.5 long days of gaming in a week rather than 2. Starting one of the days a couple hours later would have made the difference, I think. Now I know.
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OT: package arrived today and the item to be passed along has been. He was pleasantly surprised. :-)
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Also, our pieces are red, orange, blue, and white FWIW. I'd love to have purple.
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The first two make the game substantially more difficult (don't try them with 6 epidemics).
The bioterrorist probably also makes the game a lot more difficult, if played correctly.
I didn't play it correctly. The other players ignored me entirely, except on rare occasions when I did something threatening. Next time: be more threatening, and fear capture less.
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Having an opposition player changed the play dynamic in an important way (that I failed to note in the original post): we weren't communicating as openly as we would have normally, lest we tell the bio-terrorist too much of our plans. This forced every player to take more personal responsibility and, from another vantage point, cut down on the tendency to have one or two players dominate the planning.
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But sometimes, the domineering personality is overruled and is forced to take comfort in the occasional told-you-so. ;>)
Which reminds me, we most definitely played TWO games of Pandemic.
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(I didn't mean you, by the way -- or anyone else specifically. Different people have played the "domineering player" role at different times. :-) )