Germantown 11/05/07

Once again, a crowded cafe and a fun evening of gaming.

• Leslie Barkley
  
• Aubrey and Shannon Bell
  
• David and Martha Briggs
  
• Rose Byington
  
• Dave Fair
  
• Doug Hoylman
  
• Bob Jones
  
• Eric and Laura Reinhold

First up for the night was Patrician. Dave Fair reports that it's a fairly innocuous and familiar-feeling game of building towers in Renaissance Italy. Not much to recommend or condemn it. And Dave won the game. Dave 32, Eric 31, Doug 30, Leslie 26, Laura 25.

With the addition of Rose, the same group set up for Circus Flohcati. Whenever she drew from the deck, Rose excelled at matching a card already on the table, thus ending her turn without getting a card. Otherwise, Doug won in a close match. Doug 47, Laura 45, Eric 43, Leslie and Dave Fair 39, Rose 19 (ouch).

Meanwhile, Bill Salvatore was teaching Ticket to Ride: Europe to David Briggs, Martha, Aubrey and Shannon. Since Bill had to leave early and the game hadn't started, he turned his place over to me when I arrived. What followed was a fairly fierce battle with Martha losing some critical routes early but making her tickets through detours and some judicious use of train stations. Aubrey made his tickets early and drew additional tickets two turns in a row. Unfortunately, he overreached and was unable to complete one of the additional tickets, despite using all his stations. Shannon built the longest train, edging her past David. But I came out on top, mostly due to completing all my tickets, including a monster 21 point Edinburgh to Athens ticket. Final scores were Bob 115, Shannon 111, David 101, Martha 81, Aubrey 70.

I brought Elfenland as I hadn't played it in a while and it handles six players. Since the other table had six, out it came. They misapplied the rule for playing a caravan over an obstacle, but otherwise ably maneuvered their Elf Princes through the land. At the end, Doug visited the most villages with 18, followed by Rose 16, Eric 16, Dave 16, Laura 12, and Leslie 12. Ties were broken by the number of cards left in hand.

For the record, here's the official Caravan rule, including how to deal with obstacles:

A) Caravan
If a player cannot play the Travel card(s) required by the type of transportation, he can play any three Travel Cards (including Raft Travel Cards) instead. This move is called a “Caravan”. “Caravans” only move on roads that provide a type of transportation. Caravans do not travel on rivers and lakes. If there is an Obstacle on the road, the player must play any four instead of three Travel Cards.

With Elfenland and Ticket to Ride done, Leslie, Dave Fair and Doug played the Traumfabrikesque Showbiz Shuffle while the TTR players tried Fantasy Flight's Quicksand. Doug completed fewer films than Dave or Leslie and fell behind. Leslie won just after Borders closed with 79 to Dave's 72, and Doug's 34.

Quicksand is a cute little maneuvering game from Fantasy Flight's Silver Line of games where you move explorers through a jungle to a temple, trying to avoid falling into (what else?) quicksand. The trick is that everyone can move each of the six explorers and each player's identity is hidden information. The game plays quickly and is reasonably fun. There is a weird bottleneck at the entrance to the temple making it important to get to one of the two spaces outside the temple first (where you will undoubtedly fall into the quicksand space or be hit with a quicksand card). Then it's a race to draw enough cards to free yourself and move into the temple. Play was very aggressive with everyone congregating outside the temple. Martha broke the bottleneck as her explorer leapt over two other explorers to win the game. Bob, David, Aubrey and Shannon were the also-rans.

Hope to see you at Euro Quest!

(All images from Boardgamegeek)