20090724 - Bang, Puerto Rico, Brass, Caylus
Ξ July 25th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Boardgames |
This session started with 2 rounds of Bang! with NXKiller/Nelhew, Kalvin, phuah, lim, jack208, waiyan and myself.
waiyan was sheriff for both games and I was the Renegade in the first game and Outlaw in the 2nd game. The first game saw jack208 the outlaw got off-ed early and myself whittling down the opposition to just the sheriff, an outlaw and myself the renegade. A three way fight saw sheriff waiyan taking potshots at the renegade, who was taking shots at the outlaw, who was shooting at the sheriff. In the end, the sheriff succumbbed to the victorious outlaw phuah.
The second game got a little tricky as jack208 falsely declared himself as a deputy when he was a renegade. lim who was a real deputy got confused and did not verbally defend himself as jack208 sided himself with another declared deputy Nelhew to take lim down. The outlaws took the advantage to clear out jack208 who proved himself to be a renegade and then took down Nelhew who was the real second deputy. Things got down to the wire as outlaw Kalvin got killed and finally outlaw phuah settles it by going mano-a-mano with Sheriff waiyan. Score two wins for the outlaws tonight!
Next as Nelhew and Kalvin left, I brought out an oldie Puerto Rico. The BGG ex-No#1 proved itself still the best in the field as lim enthusaistically gave this game a thumbs up.
I’m really rusty at this game as I got into a serious case of Analysis Paralysis as I tried to remember some strategies played ages ago.
Basically jack208 and myself diversified into multiple goods and factory scheme with myself taking a harbour-shipping bias while jack208 leaned towards quarry-building.
lim went for quarry-indigo-shipping, phuah into quarry-corn-shipping while waiyan concentrated on shipping.
The last turn came down to a mistake that resulted in no shipping and thus saw jack208 scrapped past the finishing post with his two big violet buildings followed by lim, phuah, myself and lastly waiyan. Trying to anticipate other players’ role choices still manages to tie my brains up in knots after all these years!
Next, jack208 and waiyan left as they need to get enough sleep for their marathon the next day. I, phuah and lim settled down to a game of Brass. Now I haven’t played this game in awhile while phuah and lim played it the week before. The initial cards distribution felt a bit wonky and we felt that there was a mistake printed in the rules as we ended up with odd handsizes when it should be even.
We also made a mistake of scoring the VPs as soon as the industry tiles are turned over, which resulted in some industry tiles not scoring for the rail period as they were carried forward from the canal period.
This could have affected phuah and lim’s positioning as they were both neck to neck in points. Myself however skyrocketed ahead as I remembered aanemesis’ strategy of going for the shipyards at all cost. In the entire game I built 2 shipyards while phuah and lim had none.
The last game we did was Caylus and I did not realise that lim had not played this game before. We tried explaning the game to him and kudos to him for bravely going ahead with the game despite not knowing all the rules.
lim acquitted himself quite well and phuah did his best to catch up to me. I built all the stone production buildings and despite phuah and lim’s one-two punch to lock me out of the last castle tower building section, I still managed to came ahead of them. If they had given me a few more turns, they would have been beaten out of the water by my residence and prestige buildings. As it is, I think they’ve learned the power of the building favor track in Caylus and the importance of the castle building. Perhaps the next game they’ll put up a better fight. Perhaps the next game I’ll bring out Caylus Premium Limited Edition again? Stay tuned to find out!
