Games Played 13 August 2014

12 people this week, games played were Santiago de Cuba, Power Grid, Carcassonne, Terra Mystica and Industrial Waste. With this meeting the recorded player hours for the year reached 1174.75 passing the figure for 2013 which was itself the previous record for a year.

The Power Grid game was played without any expansions on the Germany map, meaning that we have now used 11 of the official maps during the year. The game was played on the 3 central areas with northern and southern regions blocked out. I bought plant number 8 and placed last after Bob and Jonathan had placed close to each other in the west, taking Kassel and Frankfurt just to the east separated from the others by expensive connections expanding south in future turns providing an area to my east that was going to be expensive to acccess going through me in step 1.

As step 1 proceeded, Jonathan moved south in the west, until Bob started step 2 by paying the cost to build over my wall. During this time expansion of capacity was slow due to the plants that fell into the current market, althouhg during this time Bob acquired plant 24 using Garbage, which was to come back and bite him as using it meant that the price of garbage never fell below 6 throughout the game. I picked up plant 27 the 3 capacity green plant, which I wasn't too happy with at the time, but it ended up serving me for the rest of the game.

Entering step 3 Bob had most capacity while Jonathan had most cities but lower capacity that either of the other 2 of us. In the final auctions Bob chose to replace plant 21 (a 4 capacity hybrid) and keep plant 24, while I then bought plant 38, which allowed me to buy all but 1 of the garbage so 24 couldn't operate. In the building phase I was able to build 5 to end the game by expanding into the cheap western areas. In fact Bob could also have been in trouble if he had discarded 21 had a coal plant fallen into the market as I would then have been able to buy enough coal to stop one of his coal plants from running.

We followed that by Industrial Waste, which was one of  the most unusual that I have seen as  there were several accidents, mostly affecting the other 2 players and everyone ended up taking loans, 1 had 2, Bob had 4. As a result of all the accidents, the game end took longer than usual and Bob ended up with a negative score, which I don't think I've ever seen before.

All the results follow.

13/08/2014
Santiago de Cuba - 60 Mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Rachael	34
2	Lee	27
3	Steve H	24
4	Mike	20
Power Grid - 90 Mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Dave D	14
2	Jonathan M	12
3	Bob	11
Santiago de Cuba - 60 Mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Lee	33
2	Steve H	33
3	Rachael	29
4	Mike	21
Carcassonne - 30 Mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Lee	61
2	Rachael	54
3	Steve H	40
4	Mike	34
Terra Mystica - 150 Mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Jaime	99
2	Scott	83
3	Isabel	68
4	Mark W	67
5	James S	63
Industrial Waste - 90 Mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Dave D	52
2	Jonathan M	21
3	Bob	-17