Germantown 03/05/2007

Last night was another fun night of gaming at Borders! We had thirteen players, which is just fantastic.

Attending were Doug, Bill S, Bob (me), Eric, Laura, Lance, Rose, Leslie, Kevin, Bill T, Helen, Marshall and a relative newcomer to gaming, Michael. Michael has done some gaming with GCOM but this was his first time at Germantown.

I was running late due to work but when I arrived Bill S, Rose, Leslie, Lance, Laura and Eric were just finishing a game of Diamant which had been won by Lance. Bill would like it known that he mined zero gems.

Meanwhile, Helen, Doug, Bill T, and Michael were engaged in a rousing game of Shadows Over Camelot. They took a bit longer than they estimated, finishing up at around 8:45 but King Arthur and the Knights ultimately prevailed over the forces of darkness. No one was a traitor.

The Diamant group broke into two groups with Bill S teaching Eric and Laura the classic game of Acquire while I took Lance, Rose and Leslie to Arabia for the great blind-bidding game, Aladdin's Dragons. The strategies of Acquire are rather subtle, especially knowing when and where to acquire and merge, so Bill took the victory. Bill said that the major lesson of the game for Laura and Eric would be that their fighting over Imperial, which was off by itself in one corner of the board, left him to control the first few mergers. Eric says that, "At the time, I thought I was simply buying more of the chain I had an interest in, and wasn't particularly seeing Laura as a threat. I thought we fought more over the first Western, and for
Continental." By the way, they played with shares open which is a heresy. :-)

The Aladdin's Dragons group was just about to get started when Kevin showed up, so we added him to the game. I started off strong (being the only one who knew what was going on) but everyone else quickly caught on and the bidding was aggressive. One artifact wasn't acquired during the fifth round so we had one final round to bid for it. I have never seen so many bid tokens on a single artifact. Leslie and I tied in the bidding but Kevin had acquired the Camel and so ties broke clockwise from him, giving Leslie her fifth artifact. That gave Lance the victory with 7 artifacts to Kevin, Rose and my six. It's always a pleasure playing a close, competitive game and I thoroughly enjoyed this.

For the last games of the night, we broke into two groups. Marshall, Michael, Bill T, Helen and I played Web of Power. Marshall and Michael were strong in advisors while the rest of us focused more on cloisters. At the end, Helen scored big in both areas (as well as putting together the only cloister chain) for the victory.

Doug taught Blue Moon City to Eric, Kevin and Leslie. They ran short on time and had to call the game before the official ending. In the last round, Doug and Eric were tied at 3, Leslie and Kevin had two.

I want to thank everyone for coming. I hope to see you next time.