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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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Precious little going on this week, as only Ben and Becky turned out, and frankly they were more interested in getting some dinner than gaming.
Still, we managed a couple of games of Hive after an excellent lasagna and burger. Becky won them both. Our experience is that this is a very 'swingy' game if two people play it regularly. One player will clock up a succession of victories before finding themselves completely unable to win for ages, and so the pendulum goes back and forth. Becky is clearly on top of the sine curve for Hive at the minute, then.
Our interest in Alhambra has recently been re-kindled by boitajeux.net's excellent online version, although it doesn't support the 2-player game, and we enjoy a game with a dummy player, for it gets named after one of our former guinea pigs who has shuffled off to the big-bag-of-grass-in-the-sky. Our dummy player for Alhambra is Zebedee, and his brother Dougal is the name we give to the dummy die in Glen More.
It's been a while since we played this, and Becky made that a bit obvious by forgetting some of the ramifications of the scoring. Zebedee raced out into an early lead, and I had to wait until the last scoring to overhaul him, beating him by just three points. I do find Alhambra to be reasonable entertainment if one's brain is turned off, but as a game it's still a bit 'meh'. The variety of expansions are really crucial in stopping the game becoming tedious, which I suppose is part of the cleverness of the design.
Wanting to push off for an early night, we settled on one last game of Goa, probably my favourite game and right up there for Becky, too. It's losing its lustre a little because we've played too many 2-player games together and settled into our own tactics (Becky colonises and I go heavy on Nutmeg and expedition cards - they balance each other pretty well and we split victories about 50-50). It's still awesome with three, four, or even a different head-to-head opponent, though. Tonight was definitely a night for the colonists, although I will confess to a miscalculation about halfway through and had to resort to collecting four matching expedition symbols and paying my way down the development board in the last two rounds. Having craploads of money was no good, and I lost 41-38.
The talk of the long-awaited Goa re-print seems to have fizzled again, so it looks like my copy might become even more precious.
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Owner of original 'crappy art' GtR and pleased about it.
