Games upon Games

Well, games-wise this week is proving to be very busy, after the weekend with Mal, I played a few games with Richard on Monday and we're having friends round for games again tonight :-)

First up - last weekend. In addition to the copious games of Border Reivers mentioned in a previous post The Wife, Mal and I had a game of Puerto Rico on Saturday night. It was my first 3-player game of Puerto Rico, and I was impressed by the speed of the game - it seemed to go much quicker than the 4- and 5-player games. Mal hadn't played before, so we talked him through his options as the game went along - he was up and running very quickly, as is pretty much expected with Eurogames - they look and sound complicated until you start playing at which point you realise the play is straightforward - it's just finding a winning strategy that's hard. Mal made use of his Hacienda to build up an impressive range of plantations, and made good use of it, getting several early shipments off to the Old World. The Wife and I got the Construction Hut and proceeded to stock up on quarries, so in the early stages we had very few goods to trade or ship. One difference we spotted was more available wealth in the 3-player game (possibly due to the ratio of role cards getting doubleloons to players which is 1:1 for a 3-player game). As a result we all got one of the large buildings. The game ended when I filled all of my building slots, and in the final count Mal's judicious use of the Hacienda and Captain paid off as he won the game by a healthy margin.

Monday's games with Richard consisted of two games of Carcassonne, followed by a game of Border Reivers. It was Richard's first game of either, but as usual Carcassonne proved a very entertaining and easy to learn game. I won the first game as Richard had not spotted a large area I had managed to farm on my own, however, Richard struck back winning the second game by a healthy margin after he managed to join a massive city of mine to a tiny city of his while simultaneously completing them both. Nice.

We finished off with a game of Border Reivers, and yet again I was beaten at my own game. As I've said before combat is Border Reivers is brutal - if you go into a fair fight you're both likely to lose lots of armies. Richard played fairly aggressively, made good use of the cards (he had 4 at one point - that scared me) and often went into fair fights. Somehow, feeling on the back foot he got me attacking him back in fair fights, rather than waiting for backup or manoeuvring an advantage. It cost me, I lost a few fights and the Richard could wipe me out at the end. Still, I enjoyed it - there was a bit of back-and-forth over the mine and some interesting use of cards too.

That's enough for now, more after tonight's games fest which with any luck will feature a first outing of Caylus...