Game Night

Friday Sept. 12, 2008
I headed out to the Gamer's Inn for a bit of gaming. The store has moved since I last was in Arizona, but was only another mile or so down the road. About all I can say is that they had a better selection of snacks. The gaming area has shrunk (though to be fair, in a couple of weeks, the store will have taken over the area adjacent to it, so there is supposed to be much more gaming area available. The area was so tight this night, that we stuck 11 folks (two games) on one table, and had no other tables for the remaining people as they came in. At any rate, I got there and joined Amelia, Dan, and Grant for a game of Qwirkle. Despite turning in tiles on a number of turns, I was scoring well and in the lead most of the game until the end, when Amelia kept leaving rows of 5 for Dan to finish off. I was first loser by a couple of points.
By then, we had a number of folks and we setup Wabash Cannonball. We actually ended up playing with 6 players (which I didn't mind, since the more that know the game, the better for future plays). Joining Amelia, Grant and I were Matthew Frederick, Scott, and Jake. The game was over about 2/3 of the way through, when Jake (who hadn't won any stocks in the initial four), grabbed his second share of red (Penn). With the rest of us spread out, he was making money that the rest of us couldn't match. He won with $86 - about $10 in front of everyone else. Nobody made it to Chicago either. I thought I'd dislike it with 6, but I thought it was ok. You have less control, but you also have more chances to make careful and tactical plays that will pay out.
I had hoped to get the new China/Korea Power Grid map, but despite the enormous amount of games available at the store, this map wasn't available. Still, I had Power Grid with me and we had 5 players, so Scott, Grant, Amelia, Matthew and I played PG - on the France map. The game was pretty tight overall, and this was one of those games where coal was in high demand - bad for me since I needed 5-7 coal each round. Despite that, I was still in good shape as the end approached. I was sure Grant was going to win (so was he), until we realized we could keep him from winning by keeping him from getting enough coal to power his plants. Sure enough, there were only 2 pieces of coal come his turn to buy and he stormed out off the store pissed off. I was the only player who could hit 15 cities to end the game, and realized I'd lose in a tiebreaker. However, since Grant had walked off, and I wasn't positive I could win if the game went another turn anyway, I opted to end the game. Scott beat me by about $5-10 in the tie breaker.
To end the night, Amelia and I teamed up against Matthew and Erik VonBurg in Tichu. Ameila had only played once before, but accounted herself well and in fact, we killed Erik and Matthew. I rattled off 5 Tichu calls including the last one where we went 1-2 to end up with 1100+ points to Erik and Matthew under 400 (maybe it was 300). Either way, a good way to end the night.