Session Summary - 19 September 2007

I was hoping to post this together with last weeks summary, having again let it ride longer than it should, however I'm umming and arring a bit over comments on Caylus Magna Carta and it's taking a little longer to write than I thought, so here's this one that I did earlier.

It was me and Mike this week so he dug out some 2 player games.

Kahuna 50 mins
Player	Posn.
Mike	1
Dave D	2

I seem to recall watching Mike play this in the past, but have never played it myself. The idea is to control islands by building the majority of bridges form that island to its neighbours. When you achieve this you get to knock down an opponents bridge form the island you've just taken. This is done by the play of cards to place bridges and also to knock down bridges. Scoring is based on whoever controls the most islands at the end of each of the 3 rounds.

The problem to my mind is that when you reach the 5 card hand limit you have to start discarding cards to draw new ones, so if you accumulate the cards to make a major attack, you are virtually committed to playing it immediately or lose one of the cards and if you are forced to do this too early in the round you give your opponent time to respond, while you have to start building your hand again.

Still fairly inoffensive 5/10.

San Juan 30 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Mike	1	32
Dave D	2	26

This works OK with 2 players, but as has been pointed out by many people including the designer Andreas Seyfearth, the Library is so very powerful when one player has one and the other doesn't (despite the fact that you can only use it for one role when you're Governor). In this case Mike had one as his first build but he was unable to draw many other good cards to go with it. He still won by 6 points.

Babel 30 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Dave D	1	18
Mike	2	5

Another in the Kosmos 2 player series and to my mind better than Kahuna. I seem to recall playing it before in the dim and distant past before records began (I think with Julian). The game has interesting options with scope for some nice combos to bash your opponent. It was indeed quite satisfying to finish the game off by stealing the top of Mike's big temple and then demolishing the rest of it and I'd certainly play again, but I think that if I know a session's going to be exclusively 2 player I'd rather fill it with Fury of Dracula. 6/10

Now I must get back to last week and Caylus Magna Carta.