Games Played - 6 September 2017

While the usual four settled down to their latest session of "Risk : Legacy", the new "Terraforming Mars" board saw its first outing, and a new game "Cry Havoc" debuted at the Club, I sat down with Stan and Michael to play one of my favourites of the last few years - Wolfgang Kramer's "Coal Baron" aka "Gluck Auf".  After a rules runthrough for Michael as he'd not seen it before, Stan was start player and we started mining and shipping - Michael got the hang of the game immediately and at the end of the 1st of the 3 rounds only 3 points separated us all.  I'd been unable to prevent Stan from getting start player (a big advantage usually) for 2nd round, he looked to be doing well but at the end of the round it was still close, this time Stan was 2 pts ahead of me and I was 2 pts ahead of Michael.  Stan was shorter on money than us but as he was start player again at this point I thought he was favourite, especially as I had a serious imbalance between light and dark mine sides and Michael had no contracts.  In the end though Stan really stalled in the final turn, while Michael ran up a massive 19 pts of contracts, and as we ran through the 12 ways of scoring the lead changed hands several times, with several joint 2nd places (mostly against me) until Michael pulled ahead (137 pts), I squeaked a very grateful 2nd (130 pts) and Stan was 3rd (125 pts).  A terrfific game that had been impossible to call.

We then played "Love Letter Premium Edition", it's the standard game with lovely huge cards plus the box offers replacements for existing cards and/or entirely new cards that you can add in.  We chose just to add in the 'Jester' and the 'Assassin', and they did add some extra nuances to the game inclduing, unfortunately for me, the only time that the Assassin triggered (if a Guard targets a player with the Assassin, the Guard-user dies instead).  With the Jester (get a heart token if the player you give the Jester token to wins the hand) we managed to get a drawn game - with Michael still yet to score, Stan and I were both on 3 (playing to 4) and Stan Jestered me before I won the hand so we both got a token.

Finally "This Town Ain't Big Enough", 24 cards of murderous brain-burning where Stan and I managed to freeze Michael out of a big corral to dump him into 3rd but I couldn't stop Stan capturing the other big corral for the very steadily played win (10 to 8 to 7).