The Mine Shaft Gap

Venue: Canberra
Present: The Australian gaming community and their families
Played: All kinds of stuff

Soon it was time for the Sunday evening session back at the hotel. Here’s the scene on night 2 (were you there…?!).
The Sunday night session included 4 games for me (3 new ones):

Finca: Nice game about harvesting fruit and delivering to markets on what appears to be a small Italian island. The little tokens are cute and these, combined with the board and scoring token artwork allow you to almost smell the fruit!
About 45 mins + rules and setup.
Results: Paul (green): 47. Pat (blue), Rick (yellow): 46. Craig (red): 3? (ie., 30-something).

Peloponnes: Here’s another in the genre of ancient civilization building. Compete with the other players to acquire resource-generating land and improvements, and try to get a score that balances population growth with civilization advances/improvements. The twist, or rather, sting in the tail, is the revelation of two random disasters at the conclusion of each turn. Eg., a famine will excise one third of your population; an earthquake will destroy every building improvement you can’t support with extra stone and wood resources; a drought will destroy your crop resources, etc. In fact, the devastation wielded by these events is so severe and non-discriminating that it’s actually funny.
It is possible to manage against these disasters, as I was able to do in the latter part of the game, but it’s hard work getting your little civilization to be in such a well-hedged state. By game end I could withstand all disasters except for famine, and there were two of these within the last two turns, which had a decimating effect on my population. In fact I think these hurt everyone quite badly, and combined with other disasters that Craig had no protection against basically reduced his population to zero. Horrible - yes very. But also funny.
18 mins rules and setup; 50 mins game time.
Results (primary score/secondary=tiebreak): Paul (black): 12/19. Rick (yellow): 12/18. Pat (blue): 12/17. Brian (green): 3. Craig (red): 0.

Such a Thing: With the night drawing to a close we sought something to support five players that wasn’t too long. Despite fitting into the party games genre (sort of), Such a Thing turned out to be such a thing. We had heard some earlier warnings from Melissa about the potential adults-only innuendos that could arise, and we knew we were off to a good start when the first two cards drawn were the ones shown here (click to enlarge).
Sigh. So we played on, but not without controversy, as debate erupted a few times over interpretation of characteristics. 5 mins rules and setup; 38 mins game time.
Brian, Craig, Pat, Rick D., Paul.

Finca: Everyone else retired for the night, leaving Richard and Ed in for a new game. Having played this one already tonight, it was easy to move into it again. I think all three of us were doing about equally well, until Richard managed to deplete both Ed and my significant holdings of olives! The acquisition of the 7-point bonus tile was sufficient to seal the deal and hand Richard a good win.
18 mins rules explan & setup; 45 mins game time.
Results: Richard (blue): 52. Paul (green): 43. Ed (red): 42.

Monday - Day 3 of the Expo - saw us back on the floor in family mode, eager to put away a few more game trials. I introduced Paula and Mr. 7 to Ra the Dice Game, which I like very much, and was pleased to see Mr. 7 take to it quite well. In fact, he won the game, if I’m not mis-remembering.
Somewhere along the way Paula got into a game of Atlantis (was that the night before, perhaps?), which must have made an impression, because it has been given a good workout on BrettSpielWelt since then. Unfortunately the game appears to be not yet available in Australia, otherwise I think it would have been another new addition to our collection.

Before our departure I got to pick out one more new purchase, which was Lascaux, based pretty much on the appealing cover art alone (OK, I admit it – I like ’shiny’ things).
Haven’t had the chance to play this yet.