The Mine Shaft Gap

Venue: Paul’s place
Present: Alex, Jeff, Richard, Brian, Pat, Paul
Played: Roll Through the Ages, Race for the Galaxy, Goa, Mutant Chronicles, Lost Valley, Magna Grecia, Vikings, Lost Cities the Board Game, Indiana Jones Top Trumps.

Yes, I struggled to find a snappy or witty title for this entry, so I settled for a prosaic ironic one.

Roll Through the Ages: Evening starter, presumably because Pat didn’t bring Fairy Tale tonight. But actually, I did suggest this, coz it’s cool.
27 mins.
Results: Paul: 26. Jeff: 24. Pat: 15. Alex: 10.

Race for the Galaxy: Also in the filler category, timed right so that Brian, Richard and I could have dinner.
23 mins.
Results: Pat: 48. Alex: 36. Jeff: 31.

Goa: This felt like an unusual game of Goa tonight for a number of reasons. First, the pace of the game was the fastest I’ve played, with everyone taking their actions ’simultaneously’. This keeps the pace up, but the risks are that a) you lose track of the other players’ strategies, and b) mistakes are made that are not audited and caught by the other players. One example was that both Brian and I failed to factor in our position on the ‘penguin’ track when attempting to expand colonies. I think we managed to correct these errors, but I can’t help wondering whether I made others…
The second reason this was an unusual game was that Pat played a significantly different strategy compared to previous games - he didn’t go for the sextant cards this time, but instead put his energies into ships and goods.
Third, the average tile bids, I thought, were well above what I’d seen in any previous game. The average for this game must have been around $9 or $10, compared to around $6 for previous games I’ve played. And strangely, I actually managed to keep up with prices for the most part, helped by the fortuitous acquisition of a renewing $4 per turn tile in turn 3.
The results were intriguingly close, with Pat still successful despite his altered strategy, and me surprised with my own result given that I had not progressed at all well down the advance tracks for most of the game.
5 mins rules and setup; 74 mins game time.
Results: Pat (blue): 44. Paul (yellow): 43. Jeff (green): 42. Brian (red): 32.

Mutant Chronicles: This is something I’d been playing with significantly cut-down rules with my 5- and 7-year olds who were of course simply attracted to the miniatures. But Richard was drawn to this too without being aware of this feature, and Alex, having played before, was a willing opponent. And they played full rules, with vp counts, despite this being the starter set with a mere three characters on each side (when I play with the kids, we just play to elimination).
Reports are that it worked nicely.
And I’m disappointed that my close-up pic is out of focus.
Results are that Richard’s forces were defeated soundly by Alex on victory points.

Lost Valley: Cut down a tree get a lo-og…
A long time since I’ve played this one and I was soon reminded of some of the challenges and frustrations of player-characters! The main one is the risk and difficulty associated with mining gold. Extra whisky-induced actions not withstanding, it takes two turns to get something back from your mine and in the meantime your parasitic opponents can swoop in and suck all the goodness out before you get any return on your investment. Associated with this is the limitation on carrying capacity: To build a mine and retrieve one token requires 2 wood, 2 food and one tool, which therefore requires a cart if you intend to retrieve a token immediately after building a mine.
I did eventually succeed in pulling three 4-gold tokens from my mine, but that was only after a lot of preparation and ensuring that my opponents were so far away that they weren’t likely to gate-crash my party. Alex had his own tough time on the other side of the river, losing three times in animal hunt dice rolls. Pat instead played a straight-up-the-river strategy with a fishing rod and a sieve, and drew out nearly every single piece of alluvial gold to be had. Lower yields per token than a mine, but certainly higher yields per turn uncontested, and therefore the game.
43 mins incl. rules.
Results: Pat (blue): 18. Paul (green): 15. Alex (yellow): 8.

Magna Grecia: Markets, oracles and roads
~15-20 mins rules and setup; ~45 mins game time.
Results: Richard (orange): 38. Jeff (brown): 33. Brian (red): 26.

Vikings: Neither Brian nor I had played this one for ages, so we both needed a rules refresher. And although we both thought we played ok, the final score reveals that actually we both performed as badly as each other! But it certainly was not a simple nor obvious thing to prevent Pat from building his enormous army of red guys who, along with red bonuses, provided more than one third of his tally.
6 mins rules and setup; 40 mins game time.
Results: Pat (white): 106. Brian (orange), Paul (dk brown): 66.

Lost Cities the Board Game: I have no comments to make on this one. But, my pics look good, don’t they? (Especially the close-up).
69 mins incl. rules.
Results: Alex (yellow): 600. Jeff (brown): 515. Richard (black): 335.

Indiana Jones Top Trumps: This was still lying around from a few weeks ago, so I dealt it out while we waited for the other guys to finish Lost Cities. This isn’t much of a game with only two players (arguably not much of a game with any number), but it passed the time for five minutes.
Brian: 20. Paul: 10.