I spent a busy weekend playing games.
On Saturday, I first stopped by Good Games Ballarat and played a game of Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries with Mark; I also picked up "Naval Battles" and had a game of that with Liam, before heading over to Randy’s and our regular boardgame day.
Of note from the BGD:
* Rich completely dominated a game of "Age of Empires III" (yes, the boardgame), winning with a score of 98 points. It was an absolutely brilliant performance from Rich, which none of us managed to get close to.
* We played "Sceptre of Zavandor" for the first time. It’s ranked #177 on BGG. This was a very fun Eurogame: you’re buying and selling magical gems, artifacts and learning new tricks of knowledge. The eventual object is to get a couple of familiars (sentinels). Randy came from a slow start to dominate the final part of the game, but I was competitive. Laurie decided to sell everything that would earn him money to buy something he didn’t need, and came last by a long way as a result.
* We played "Nuclear Escalation", one of the variants/expansions to the classic game of "Nuclear War". Everyone lost. It’s been 20 years since I last played it! It’s a beer and pretzels game, much like "Naval War", which was also played here.
* My quest to introduce people to "Race for the Galaxy" continued. I really like the game, but I certainly haven’t played many games with more than 2 players. Playing four players was really unusual – and a lot of fun. I won this game by a moderate amount. As Laurie and Ian were playing for the first time, this wasn’t surprising.
* Randy brought out his new copy of "Wallenstein". Well, it’s a 2nd-hand copy, but it was an absolute delight to play the fore-runner to Dirk Henn’s Shogun. I don’t like it anything as much as "Shogun", but it’s a very different experience due to the way the events and the maps are different (despite everything else being the same!) Randy and Laurie did pretty well in this game. I had a promising start but ended in ruin.
On Sunday, I went back to Good Games Ballarat, but there weren’t really enough people to make it a satisfying day. I played a game of Naval War with Liam and Jackson, and then a four-player draft (3 packs of Alara Reborn). I don’t want to draft only Reborn again – the card selection is very unbalanced IMO, and a lot of really important staples are missing (like cheap ways of dealing with flying creatures).
I need more sleep, now!