Germantown 02/19/2007

Monday at Borders went very well with attendance by Bob, Doug, Lance, Eric, Laura, Leslie, Kevin, Bill T, and Rose. Below are my recollections. Since my memory sucks, there may be some glaring errors. :-)

We started off with a couple of quick games of No Thanks. Eric won the first game while Laura took the second. Laura had an amazing run of eight cards or so, helped by her drawing three or four sequential cards on her turn.

At that point we had six players so we broke out Metro. This was a rather nasty game with lots of train lines scoring only 2 or 3 points. At the end, I scored a 20+ point train which put me in the lead by one point, resulting in a very close victory.

After Metro we had eight people and so broke into two groups of four. Kevin, Bill T, Laura and Leslie learned Masons, while Bob, Doug, Lance and Eric broke out Dschunke. Being the only one who had played both games, I taught Masons while my fellow players set up Dschunke. Then my group suffered through my bumbling explanation of the Dschunke rules (it's been a long time since I played).

Given that no one had played Masons before, the strategies were somewhat unorthodox. At least half of the towers were played on the board before a single city was built. Then they constantly merged each newly created city, creating an enormous megalopolis. Kevin was best able to take advantage of this and won decisively.

Once we had played a turn of Dschunke everyone got what we were doing and play went well. We did get one rule wrong, using a special card to pull a crate strip from underneath another crate strip, but the rules were ambiguous on the point. A quick check on BGG later showed that the issue had been resolved by someone on BGG e-mailing the designer, Michael Schacht. A third of the way through the game, Eric had a commanding lead. Two-thirds through, Lance had passed Eric and I had closed the gap. Doug was consistently hosed on the blind bidding and so lagged behind. At the end, Lance won by a few points over Eric with Doug and I in the back.

It was after 9PM so Eric, Laura and Lance left, leaving the remaining six of us (Rose having arrived) to play three rounds of Poison. Rose and I were ahead after the first two rounds but a bad third round for us and a good round for Kevin gave him the game.

Thanks to everyone. Looking forward to seeing you next time!