Session Summary - 6 February 2008

6 players this week and we split 4 & 2 with Dave & Ben playing together as Ben wanted to play Chaos Marauders, the score as below. I can't remember how to play this game which I had once, but Dave left a note that the apparent wide disparity in the scores was due to a major attack made by Ben, which went badly wrong, but could possibly have won him the game if it had succeeded.

Chaos Marauders 60 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Dave C	1	1430
Ben	2	340

The other game they played was Khronos, a game that I have quite enjoyed in the past; the positions were reversed in this one.

Khronos 60 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Ben	1	41
Dave C	2	38

Over on the other table, our major game for the evening was Power Grid, this one played on the French board using the big power plant deck variant with the expansion plants. Essentially you mix the two decks together, but only one of each number is permitted in the game, so when the first of a number comes up it is thrown out and the second of that number is used when it appears. There are still a number of plants to be removed depending on the number of players, so at the beginning the second plant of a number is also thrown out. This means that in this version of the game the missing plants are definitely known as opposed to secret as we would play using a single deck.

After some discussion we eliminated the two southern most regions and the game started. As a result of the variant played the game got off to a stuttering start as many power plants had to be turned up and discarded before a new plant found its way into the market, but this was largely eliminated after the first one or two and the game moved into its normal rhythm. I started and bought the 4 plant from the new deck (1 hybrid powers 1), while Steve picked up the number 1. Mike ended up with the new number 6, which is a definite improvement on the old powering 2 cities for a trash rather than a single. Julian went with the 5 from the new deck which also powers two. Starting off the city building, Steve went for a central location in Orleans, while I took one of the Paris locations and Julian set up shop, I think in Le Mans and Tours. That all left Mike with a large choice of starting position and he went out in the east (I think Nancy and Besancon).

In the early stages of the game I got somewhat boxed in and managed to find just 4 10 value locations before step 2 arrived, Steve had managed to grab the first plant powering 5 cities (the old 20) and expanded North to my east, while Julian moved around to my west. I suppose I may have expanded quicker to grab the cities before others could but did not want to exceed my capacity to power them. I don't think I was in that bad a position because I had picked up a 3 capacity wind plant and could power those four for the cost of 1 a turn, such was the price of oil due to a lack of plants of that type, but as it turned out step 2 happened immediately.

In step 2 we came across a peculiar effect that may have been due to how the 2 decks mixed together, I think that often where a 5 plant corresponds to something lower in the other deck, that we often seemed to get the lower one in the game. Although a few 5 powering plants appeared of which we somehow allowed Steve to pick up 3 and I picked up the old 30 powering 6 for 3 trash, after that we ran into a situation where the maximum available plant capacity was 4 and having built up to a certain level, things really stalled with even the future plants not worth 5 (there's nearly always a mid range stall but this seemed different somehow).

So we just sat there with Steve sitting pretty on 15 capacity, which he couldn't improve, but the rest of us were stuck below that figure and either couldn't improve or could only improve so slightly that the only reason to buy a plant was to nudge the market along, which would of course have meant taking a hit to everybody else’s advantage. So the money just accumulated until Steve had enough to end the game, which I was, maybe able to delay by a turn by buying up enough trash to stop him firing a plant at one point. Step 3 did actually happen when the lowest power plant was discarded when nobody bought in the last turn, but of course that meant no one got a chance to buy in the newly expanded markets.

Final scores were as below, Mike lost out to Julian in the tie break by 219 to 218, every one having a load of money on hand except Steve who had paid to end the game, but no power plants to spend it on.

Power Grid 110 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Steve H	1	15
Dave D	2	13
Julian	3	12+
Mike	4	12

Finally another outing for Taluva, the first time I had played with 4. As might have been expected this ran longer and the game ended with the exhaustion of the tiles rather than a player building all of 2 of 3 building types, which has been the case in all the 3 player games I've had. It was possible that someone might have finished that way in the last round of placement, but Mike was able to stop Steve from getting his last temple down, while Julian in turn blocked me from placing my last temple.

I think everyone enjoyed the game although Steve did comment that it was not really his kind of thing, comparing it to Carcasonne, I understand his point of view although to my mind there is a lot more to this when compared, certainly to the Basic Carcasonne game (I can't comment about the expansions).

As the game came to an end I've scored it 1 to 4 rather than just a winner.

Taluva 45 mins
Player	Posn.	Points
Mike	1	3
Dave D	2	2-2
Julian	3	2-1
Steve H	4	2-0

That's all for this week. Just to note that I've finally got round to updating the stats for last year and also for this January, I'm still thinking about the 2007 review.