The Mine Shaft Gap

Venue: Paul’s place.
Present: Brad, Pat, Brian, Andrew, Richard, Alex, Jeff, Nick, Paul.
Played: Carcassonne, Humm Bug, Thurn and Taxis, Fresh Fish, Blue Moon City, Ra, Inkognito, Tichu, Kathai.

I decided to start subtitling my entries for the questionable benefit of anyone following this through a feed.
This week saw a big turnout - nine of us, just to make game selection an even more frought task than usual. In fact, with one exception (Humm Bug; see below), this wasn’t the case at all, and there was little if any controversy or down-time between games.
This week also saw the addition of Nick S. to the roll call of Sunday nighters. Plus, he even brought some new games over with him. Nick is a former Thursday night regular at Pat’s PGA (soon to be SIGA), and is generally credited as being responsible for the introduction of modern Euro games to the shelves of Dymock’s in the city.
Pictures: With the exception of Kathia, pics this week are by Brad and the return of his excellent contributions (click on ‘em!) is also welcomed.

Carcassonne: Brad, Pat and Brian got into this early while everyone else was still on their way. A sound whipping for Pat and Brad in about 20 mins.
Results: Brian: 103. Pat: 89. Brad: 87.

Humm Bug: The air was heavy with the threat of vetoes for this one, but the momentum was too great and the bill was finally passed (three metaphors mixed in one sentence - well done).
Teams of two (except for Andrew, Alex and me) were formed simply by seating positions. Fun, and yet slightly painful at the same time. The Richard + Jeff team were devastatingly effective, and won our reduced and simplified version of the rules, partly made-up as we went along, in 13 minutes flat.
We then split up into two groups, one of four and another of five players…

Thurn and Taxis: Always good to get a crack at something new and popular in the Euro universe, especially when it’s your first playing of the most recent Spiel des Jahre winner. Pat explained the rules and the whole thing seemed straightforward; I figured I could get up to speed in this quite quickly. Sure enough, a few turns in and I felt I was at least doing no worse than anyone else. Despite some early reservations that it would be difficult to construct mail routes, these came quite easily at first. In fact, I became the first player to achieve a six-town route, and gained a three-point bonus token as a result.
Of course, things became more difficult as the game got older, and certainly not helped by Pat’s frequent scrapping of the town cards on display. On at least two occasions this ruined my well-forming plans for growing routes, while Nick (to my left) appeared not to be impacted at all, and eventually triggered the game-ending 7-long route.
Although I ended up with two tokens for 6-long routes (for a total of 4 points), and the equal lowest number of “houses” (are these post offices, or mail drop points..?) I got no completed region tokens at all, and by a single turn failed to make a house in every region. As a result, my score was woefully behind everyone else’s, even though I didn’t think I played that badly. Obviously more focus is needed or getting those region score chips…
Although there are player interactions, they seem a bit thin to me, and so this feels more like a four-player solitaire or race. Perhaps with more practice I’ll pay attention to the actions of other players and adjust my choices accordingly. And although it wouldn’t have been my pick for game of the year, I can see why it won Spiel des Jahre. I look forward to playing it again soon.
15 minutes rules; 50 minutes playing time.

Results: Nick: 25. Pat: 16. Brian: 11. Paul: 7.

Fresh Fish: Run simultaneously with Thurn and Taxis. Approx. 85 minutes rules and game play.
Results (lower is better): Alex: 3. Richard: 14 (2nd on tie break). Brad: 14. Jeff: 17. Andrew: 32. What happened? “I got hosed!”

(more to come…)