Weekend fun – Le Havre, Age of Empires, Magic

I’m now mostly over the cold I’ve had for the last week and a bit. Hooray! I was never happier that Martin cancelled Friday’s Star Wars session because it allowed me to recuperate a lot. Unfortunately, I had to cancel Thursday’s boardgaming session, which would have probably found Randy, Sarah and me playing Android.

I was well enough on Saturday to get to the regular boardgame day, though. Weirdly enough, only Sarah and Randy were there – everyone else had a case of the "we’ve got family/acting/other commitments".

So, we ended up playing Android anyway! And my first multiplayer game of Le Havre, and a three-player game ofThrough the Ages.

Yes, we had a lot of fun.

Sarah also owns Le Havre, and had played a couple of 2-player games of it. I’d played a lot of solo game. Randy hadn’t seen the game before. Guess who won? Yes, that’s right: Randy.

Randy and I have played lots and lots of Through the Ages together. Sarah’s never played it before. Guess who won that? Yeah, Sarah.

Thankfully, I won Android. Randy killed the suspect that Sarah was obsessed with, and my Android character successfully solved the crime (and made the crime worth a *lot* of VPs).

We also had a game of Ra with Randy’s daughter, Wren. Randy won that.

On Sunday, I went into Good Games Ballarat for some extra boardgaming. Rich, back from his family obligations, turn up and I introduced three of the gamers there to the Age of Empires III boardgame. In the end, I won narrowly from Rich, who had an exceptional game. It was rather scary to see how many points he achieved from colonies…

We also had a three-player game of Race for the Galaxy, which I dominated; you really need to play that game a bit before you get good at it.

After that, I participated in a 6-player Magic: the Gathering draft using the Alara block. As with the draft last week, I blitzed the field: 2-0, 2-0, 2-0. Sarah and Daniel wandered by a little later on and demonstrated Galaxy Trucker to Mick, and listened to my stories about how terrible my deck was. Honestly, the draft was mad: I thought I would be playing blue throughout most of the draft, but I ended up building a Red/Black/Green deck. I drafted seven rares in the draft, and only used one of them in the final deck: the Feral Hydra. It’s a rather nice card, and in the one game I played it it achieved terrifying proportions.

Once again I played a 17 creatures, 17 land and 6 spell deck… well, almost. It actually was 15 land and 8 spells, but two of the "spells" were Borderpost artifacts – basically a dual-coloured land. I won a lot of my games by having a better source of mana than my opponents. I can tell an inexperienced Magic player by the size of their draft deck: many are 50+ cards rather than the bare 40 I played with, and they really, really get into mana problems.

The game I came closest to losing was against Neil Nickless, against whom I’ve played many good games over the years. Neil had played a 2/3 flyer, and I just couldn’t block it. I watched my life whittling away: 16, 14, 12, 10, 8… To make things worse, I was drawing a *lot* of land. In the entire game, I only drew 6 spells (and 9 land).

However, I managed to play first a Feral Hydra and then a Thorn-Thrash Viashino. The Viashino was funny: It’s a 2/2 with Devour 2 and G:Trample. It ate a couple of 1/1 elves when I played it (the only other creatures I’d played) and suddenly was a 6/6. Then came Sylvan Bounty (creature gains +1/+1 counters equal to its current power)… and I had a 12/12 trampler along with the Feral Hydra, which was now 10/10. Neil lost his creatures futilely blocking mine, and the game was mine.