Tuesday 16 October 2007

Luke is the Champion at Drawing Red Tiles From a Bag


What a games night. Ten players, three tables, a civilization born, Jimmy inventing fire, Matt singing Iron Maiden, Dan and James turning up….it had everything. Andy has already described the role play esq extravaganza that was heavy metal lyrists dream and I haven’t a clue where Tom, Jimmy, Harry and Stephen got to in their history of the world, though as soon as someone had discovered the art of metallurgy I am sure a hari-kari or two may have ensued.

Dan, James and Luke played Torres which had not seen the light of day for over a year having last been played at the complete Angler. Dan had played before and could vaguely recall some of the actions, Luke read the rules and James soaked it all in comparing it as ever to ‘thief of Bagdad’. The game flowed reasonably well and with the wrong players can suffer from the dreaded ‘Analysis Paralysis’ but this wasn’t the case. James and Luke battled over the largest region and Dan stayed clear which ultimately cost him contention as when the final scores were calculated Dan’s lack of points in this one huge region made all the difference. Luke ended up wining though James ran him close and the unfair advantage Luke had in having played before albeit a while ago obviously made the telling difference.

The second game on our relatively small table was Dan’s ‘Tigris and Euphrates’ a Kineza game that was first and last played one the club was a fledgling group at St Andrews tavern. This game is ranked number 3 in the all time board game geek lists and despite enjoying many aspects of it I have to say it is sensationally over rated. The game has brilliant conflicts, abstract (if you like that sort of thing) strategies and tactical depth but falls down time and time again on luck. If you don’t have the right tiles at the right time you lose. Its all well and good to say that Luck should even itself out but it seldom does. James drew 2 possibly 3 red tiles throughout the game and Dan drew only a few more. Luke repeatedly drew red tiles and as a result constantly won internal conflicts. If Luke ever lost external conflicts which rarely happened, he then proceeded to gain control again the following turn with an internal fight. With several monuments coming out relatively early the flow of cubes to the annoying Crocker was insatiable. Wanting as ever to prolong the agony Luke contemplated earning more cubes till he finally realised he might win if he ended the game. Second place was tight and went down to the third colour. I believe it was Dan who won but I was too busy doing my victory dance to notice.

That makes it Puerto Rico 9 games ago that Luke was beaten……whatever happened to ‘In your face Crocker’?

No comments: