(For those interested in such things, my current Limited rating is 1795).

Saturday should have held our regular boardgame day at Randy’s house, but Randy was off at a wedding, so Rich and I met at Good Games Ballarat instead. Mark, co-owner of the store, was very happy to see us there as he was “working” the entire day. What that meant was that he played boardgames with us all day, occasionally leaving us briefly to serve customers.

We also got a new player, Michael, who had seen my post about boardgames and decided to come along. Michael was great to have there. We began with a game of Carcassonne, which he’d never played before, but he still managed to beat us all – it was a close game between him and Rich. You can see my session report here.

Then I pulled out Race for the Galaxy; unfortunately, I wasn’t able to separate all the expansions first, which would have been much easier for all these new players. Liam also joined us for this game. I won this (not surprisingly) but with a very low score and definitely catchable. My session report for this is half-written; I’ll post it on BGG tonight.

I set up a game of Agricola, but then Jess arrived to have her tutorial on Carcassonne that she’s wanted for the last month or so. So, leaving Agricola set up, we played a couple more games of Carcassone (one with the five of us, the next just Jess and me). I can’t remember who won those games, but they were fun.

Michael then had to leave us, so wasn’t able to play Agricola. Mark and Rich could, though, and so we set off into a 3-player game… but I forgot to remove the 4 player cards from the improvement and occupation decks. Oops. We did replace the action cards, though. I recently bought some animeeples and better wood & clay tokens. They really worked well. I thought Rich had this game, but the final scoring put me 10 points in front! Session report here.

Now it was dinner time, and so we ordered some pizza. Then, with Craig and a few others arriving, we started an 8-player Magic (M10) draft. Mark sanctioned this event, so it would count for my rating… with great joy, I managed to win all three rounds. Rich, playing in his first draft (and having not played much Magic) drafted a mostly Black deck with not quite enough creatures, but still went 1 match win, 1 match loss and 1 match draw. (He played me in the last round, which was always going to be difficult to win). For a novice with Magic, it was an exceptional effort. I gave him most of the commons and uncommons I’d drafted afterwards, so he’s on his way to having a Magic collection. 🙂

That was Saturday. On Sunday, I slept a lot. Well, played with my new laptop a bit, and played a Magic Online draft or two, but mostly slept – it didn’t help that I’d been up to 3 or 4 am listening to the cricket!