by Loofish
Part 2 of my birthday weekend of gaming. Part 1 is here.Part 2 was supposed to be a bit closer to part 1 than this, but I will go for a Back to the Future motif and have a gap between the first two with the final part close behind.
Anyway, after our impromptu night of games on Thursday, I wasn't expecting to be up to much on Saturday. But in our attempted arranging of things, Tom had thought he and his fiancee were coming over Saturday night. And indeed they went that one step further and offered to bring dinner with them. That left my wife free to do something she does supremely well - bake a birthday cake for me. :)
After a delicious dinner (a hearty beef stew with french bread to dip in it), it was time for some games, so I pulled out 7 Wonders for the first time. After I sorted things out, the game played remarkably smoothly, the game flows well and the only thing I got wrong was to change direction for Age II (though that probably would have a greater effect on a game where we knew what we were doing more!). We all played the A side Wonders, I had the Mausoleum, my wife the Pyramids at Giza, Tom the Hanging Gardens and Susanna the Lighthouse at Alexandria. As I often do when playing a game for the first time, I picked a line to explore and after getting a few early resource cards down, the green science cards seemed like the line to take, as I was not sure where I would get the ore to make my wonder. Tom gathered resources and announced he was going to build a mighty military and then he mostly didn't; my wife quietly acquired one though. Susanna built some civic cards and some science ones too. Tom's military slowly built up - he took several defeat cards and I also stayed behind my wife throughout but managed to get ahead of Susanna. Tom did triumph ultimately though and his big set of resources meant he could build a slew of civic buildings. My wife built her wonder completely (the only one who did), backed up with a couple of guilds, one which took advantage of the defeat tiles she had handed out! So in the final accounting, while I scored pretty well for my science buildings, it was her that triumphed by a single point.
I partly bought this game because of recommendations in the comments on this blog, so I have to thank you guys for that. It really has that feeling of many things you could do and you'd like to do most of them, but there is only so many moves to make. The part I am not sure about yet is how much control can you exert on the game - how much can you take a line and get the cards you need? After all, for the most part you will seeing the cards you get for the first time and won't see them again after you pick that one. But my gut tells me there are enough cards of each type that you can play something you want - it is if you are too inflexible in your strategy that you will run into trouble. This will be getting lots more play with us I feel.
Then my wife wheeled out the cake, a delight of a chocolate cake with a rich chocolate icing. The cake itself was so moist and delicious, Susanna proclaimed it better than you'd get in a restaurant and I have to say it was very good indeed.
After the thought and concentration of 7 Wonders, I brought out something a little bit more free and easy and foxes and chickens of
Pick Picknic fit the bill nicely. I thought Tom had played before (he almost always says he hasn't and then I look it up and he has, though in this case he was right according to my log of plays) but certainly new to Susanna so a quick run down on rules was needed. But it is easy. Susanna was the first fox to strike (I swung and missed several times) but a few more were grabbed, all the while corn was being built up. In the final accounting, it was my wife again, just ahead of Susanna who jumped ahead of me when she realized that the goose she had sitting there was points for her!
Yes, if you are counting that is five in a row for my wife. If we were playing board game Pente, she won that too.
We couldn't let our guests leave with my wife winning everything and poor Tom 4th in everything so one more game was called and Tom picked King of Tokyo, a game he is particularly keen on due to his uncanny dice skills. His Gigasaur showed them again, he took on the Armor Plating and built up his points slowly but surely, staying out of Tokyo and staying out of trouble. My Meka-Dragon jumped in and out several times, quite often barely surviving. Both Susanna (Kraken) (early on) and my wife (Cyber Bunny) (later) pulled the Extra Head which is often so devastating, but Gigasaur just kept on going, barely even using his Shrink Ray and there was little we could do to stop him in the end as he moved inexorably to 20 points. (My moral victory - I wasn't eliminated!)
We'd had a little break from giant monsters, we played it quite a bit when I first got it, but coming back to it, it was still a ton of fun. But the little break from it refreshed it for us. You can over-play these things.