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Sharon Khan
United Kingdom
Shefford
Bedfordshire
Games, games and more games!
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This time I had a very short time at Gradpad, as we had been invited to a friend's birthday dinner that evening, so the time my husband and I had to share was shorter than normal. I had the morning session, 4 hours of it.
After the early arrivals had all bought their morning coffee/snack (a yummy chocolate brownie-like thing in my case!), we split into two tables for the first game. Vikings and Peloponnes were suggested, and I ended up on the Peloponnes table, with James, who liked the game and knew it well, and Mike, who'd played it a couple of times but a long time ago and needed a refresher. Just as we were about to start a fourth player turned up, so he joined in, and I did a hurried rules explanation as it was totally new to him. We always play with the first expansion, but not the second one. James got very good wood/stone income early on, and was out-producing the rest of us on luxury goods very quickly; meanwhile I was grain-heavy, which meant I had no trouble feeding my population - but I was having problems getting as many people as I'd like! Mike went for a more balanced game, and Hans ignored population and grain totally and went more for buildings. The supply rounds came up nicely spaced for once, and the only early disaster was the luxuries one, so it was a fairly predictable game and hence quite high-scoring. At the end game I just beat James, as it turned out from a decision he made on the last turn - he overbid me for the tile I really wanted, so I went for a different tile, but then realised that due to a miscalculation on my part it was better for me, and if James had instead gone for that tile he would have won, as although his score would have been lower, mine was lower still!! Mike was considerably behind as he couldn't feel his massive population, while Hans had unfortunately not understood the final scoring (my use of the word "minimum" had not been understood), so only had 3 people and finished way behind.
Jessica had arrived while we were playing, and as I was keen to play Fresco and knew she liked it, we settled on that next. James joined us, and also Ray, so we were four players, all of whom had played it a few times before, but not for a while. Jessica surprised everyone by buying the central tile on the first turn - I hadn't even thought it would be possible!! James got three tiles early on and converted them to get one small cube a turn, but then struggled with cash so said afterwards that he thought that was a mistake. I had a real problem with far too many red cubes, but was struggling to get other colours with them to make useful cube combinations for tiles - however, it meant I built up quite a stockpile of cubes, but was last in the turn order, so when I did start buying Fresco pieces, I went flying past the rest score-wise. I also woke up last pretty much every day, which meant I was very happy and the extra man, and not-spending cash, which turned out to give me the win, as the extra cash just pushed me past James on the last turn. Jessica got herself in a bit of a feedback loop early game after buying that expensive tile, as she was unhappy from getting up early, but was unable to promote her happiness much or get much money because she had one less man, but as no-one would go past her score-wise, she was always last to pick her wake-up time tiles were expensive for her and her happiness kept going down.
We finished just in time for lunch, and I was desperate to play Letters from Whitechapel next, we had to wait for the Pantheon game to finish so Paul could join us, so I dashed upstairs and grabbed a quick lunch with Jessica - Sticky Toffee Pudding, yum!!! Then Jessica and I set up the board and explained the basic rules to a fourth player we'd convinced to join us, and Paul dashed upstairs after his game finished and brought his lunch down to eat while playing. Our first chase we managed to keep hot on Jack's tile the whole time, and even got him trapped in an area briefly, before he escaped via an alleyway and reached his hideout. However, such a close chase meant we knew almost exactly where his hideout was, so we were looking good to catch him on the second night. A slight waterfall on the board as Paul knocked over his cup of water had caused a slight diversion mid-chase, but luckily no real damage was done - it looked at first like the board would be marked in a couple of places, but once it all dried it looked like it would be fine! We went through a lot of toilet roll drying off components though!!! Anyway, the second chase started, and we picked up his trail quickly, with some lucky moves from Jessica giving us some early information. However, then the trail went completely dead, and I think we must have made a false assumption somewhere, as from something Paul said, we were missing something obvious that he'd done (Paul was Jack), but at least we knew where he was headed, and we were trying to block the main routes there to make it difficult for him to get there. At that point I had to hand over to Sami, so I don't know quite how the chase ended, but apparently they did catch Jack on that second night, just before he reached the hideout, by a very roundabout route! I really want to get this game - it's a real shame it appears to be out of print everywhere!!!
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