Games Played 23 July 2014

After a couple of weeks where attendances have not been as high and knowing that 3 of our regulars would be missing, I wondered if attendance might be low this week. As it turns out we had 16 people with Lee & Rachael back with the School holidays. We also had Dave C and Simon here for the first time in a few years (although I gather it's likely a one off in Simon's case). We also had a first time visit from Máté, who hails from Hungary and has just moved into the Birmingham area.

We split into 4 groups of 4, with the games played being Milestones, Stone Age, London, Power Grid, Guillotine, Ticket to Ride, Space Hulk: Death Angel and Ra. Milestones & Space Hulk were new to the club. Some further info follows.

After 3 weeks of Power Grid, I was taking a week off and my main game was London. Dave & I had played before, while James & Máté had not. I've usually found that paying back loans wasn't too much of a problem, provided that you don't take too many, but on this occasion the money seemed to flow out as fast as it came in and I was left with 2 unpaid at the end of  the game. James was the only one who was able to pay off his debt and then only just, being left with no money to score points at the end. Poverty was tight with James & I on 6 being equal lowest and neither of the other two suffering a serious penalty. I overcame the lost points due to unpaid loans, mainly due to the number of VP that I been accumulating through card activation during the game and the number of Underground markers in my boroughs at the end. I think that most of us were fairly level on the other scoring.

After that Dave left and we had a quick game of Guillotine, this one was close.

Despite my opting out, Power Grid still got played, this being on the Brazil board and was Simon's copy of  the game I think. The deck was the original without modification and I see that Gordon won.

After the Power Grid game, the same group played Ra and I watched the end of this game after finishing Guillotine, while waiting to pick up the scores. It's quite interesting, sometimes, to be a spectator of a game that you know. At the end of the second epoch it looked like it was between Simon and Bob, with Gordon struggling as a run of Ras had brought a quick end to the epoch. In the third epoch, however Simon and Bob went out early and shortage of Ra tiles allowed Gordon and particularly Jonathan to catch up. Jonathan was able to put together a big score of monuments to win the game. Simon picked up the 5 points for highest sun value giving him second over Bob who lost 5, also dropping him behind Gordon on the tie break.

Of the others, Ticket to Ride was played using the 10th Anniversary edition, which I must admit looks very pretty. I'm not sure that I would actually want to risk playing such a deluxe edition (if I had one) for fear of damage and it's not as if the standard edition of the game is in any way underproduced.

From a brief comment following the Space Hulk game, it sounds as if the Marines got a good kicking.

Results follow

23/07/2014
Milestones - 70 Mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Chris S	67
2	Jaime	52
3	Stan	32
4	Isabel	24
Stone Age - 120 Mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Steve W	150
2	Rachael	148
3	Mark W	120
4	Lee	104
London - 110 Mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Dave D	55
2	James S	47
3	Máté	34
4	Dave C	23
Power Grid - 120 Mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Gordon	16
2	Bob	13
3	Jonathan M	13
4	Simon	11
Guillotine - 20 Mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Dave D	25
2	James S	23
3	Máté	21
Ticket to Ride: 10th Anniversary - 60 Mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Chris S	162
2	Jaime	125
3	Isabel	113
4	Stan	61
Space Hulk: Death Angel - The Card Game - 40 Mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
4	Lee	-
4	Rachael	-
4	Mark W	-
4	Steve W	-
Ra - 60 Mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Jonathan M	36
2	Simon	32
3	Gordon	26
4	Bob	26