Although T&E is one of my favorite games, it doesn't seem to come off the shelf very often. Maybe because I'm looking for a 4 hr. session of frustration in one of the big FFG monsters.

So, when a 4 player game of T&E presents itself, I'm all over it!! One of the great things about T&E is the speed of the game when comparing 2-4 players. A 4 Player game feels really short and the VP needed to win is MUCH smaller than a 2 player game.

Anyhow on to the session...

I ended up being the spitoon . A nice little container that is in appearance not as threatening as the BOW, LION or "Unicorn Goat".

First moves were pretty standard being placement of leaders at red tiles which have the shortest route to the wild cubes. I decided to be "protected" by the river off of the middle of the board. I was relatively close to the LION. The other players were essentially isolated.

Within the first few turns the LION and I seem to heat up our bordering areas in little skirmishes . I REALLY wanted to go head-to-head with him but quickly thought otherwise. Avoiding the early conflict between us prevented the other isolated players from just building larger Kingdoms and thus a stronger base.

Being the friendly neighbor, I decided to send my Black and Blue emissaries to the LION's den. Faster then Sam building a WalMart on your corner, I had a ZIGGY of black and blue in the LION kingdom. Fortunately for me, the LION apparently didn't have many red tiles to challenge my position.

So, from this early advantage of picking up blue and black cubes quickly, I can focus on just the green and red. For some reason, the great BLACK AND BLUE arches of my ZIGGY attracted customers i.e. greedy opponents looking for a handout.

From this point on I needed to do some aggressive moves. Keeping my opponents on their heels would keep the ZIGGY up and running until I need not defend it any longer. This began the Kingdom Wars.

Each of the opponents with every attacking color tried to usurp the Spitoon from my corner of the world. I begat a run of tiles which at every defense I played 3 tiles to ward off the oppressors!!!
Red would attack...opponent would add tiles-> Matched by mine...
Blue attacked...matched by my 3 tiles...
Green interkingdom struggle...dominated by my 3 tiles...
Black desparately attacks...thwarted again by...you guessed it...3 tiles!!
The only conflicts I lost were small ones and others that I could afford to lose.

At this point, my opponents knew it was tight. Tiles were depleted and my one wild cube helped in keeping the SPITOON floating above the heap of ruined kingdoms...

Final score
SPITOON 9
LION 7
BOW 6
UNICORN GOAT 5