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Ben Bateson
United Kingdom
Ross-on-Wye
Owner of original 'crappy art' GtR and pleased about it.
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Just three again this week, Tony apparently suffering the misfortune of having such a big house that he can't work out who's in it. It was a bit of a blow, because I'd bought a lot of games good for five, and Bill was a no-show too.
Still, Becky John and I scraped together what we could, and as it turned out we got a lot of three-parted games to match our trio of resolute players.
We opened with Botswana, a tantalisingly brilliant game of stock manipulation with wild animals. Ben finished the first round quickly to cash in, but was overhauled over the next two rounds, which Becky and John stretched out to the limit, forcing the key cards out of Ben's hand too early. JP and Becky tied this one after the statutory three rounds.
Glen More was next, one of Becky's favourites, and she went all-in on villages and Duart Castle for a game-winning bonus of 15 points come the end of round 3. My Market-based strategy failed to pay off when the dummy-player die nicked all my villages and left me awkwardly short of men. JP distilled his way to a whisky-sodden second place.
Deciding at this point that five players was probably going to be unlikely, we broke into a game that John had just bought and I've had lying on my shelves for ages. Tycoon is a classic economic game with extraordinarily bad components. John quickly worked out the right way to win - filling up Rio with hotels and two of his factories in the first phase. We enjoyed this one a lot more than I thought, although I'm concerned that John's tactic is in fact too optimum to be beaten. This one needs further experimentation.
We had played Don earlier in the week and found it a barking-made auction game. I'm not really convinced that it's at its best with three, but JP insisted, so we dealt them out anyway.
Probably the reason Don is not effective with three is that it too easily rewards the early winners of cards - something which I think more players should nullify. Testing this theory, I won a couple of lots early on, giving myself just one of each of the six colours. It was pretty easy to go from there to pick up the win. This is a game that needs a great deal of precision on the part of all players to avoid runaway winners (and indeed runaway losers). I'm not convinced by it yet.
Closing out was another of Becky's favourites, the frankly quite alarmingly bizarre Fiji. Sure enough, she handed it to us twice running, winning convincingly enough on the second game to force a dual-resignation. I keep getting drawn to this game despite professing not to like it - I think it's the randomness of the win conditions on the cards that make it so curiously appealing. It's not unusual to be simultaneously trying to get rid of and win beads of the same colour: you'll never play the same game twice.
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Owner of original 'crappy art' GtR and pleased about it.
