Game Night

Jan. 9, 2009 - Gamer's Inn
This evening started with a plan to try out Mecanisburgo with Nathan Winchester, Matthew Frederick and Amelia Boli. Nathan was already there when I arrived and we found Noah Antwiller, Dion Garner, and some others finishing up a game of Ticket to Ride: Europe with the new dice. After they finished, we elected to play a quick game of Medici while we waited for Matthew and Amelia to arrive. It was: Nathan, Filipe Lopez, Dion, Matt Cullinan, Noah, and I. Nathan hadn't played before, so I quickly went over the rules for him and off we went. I Immediately paid too much for a load of stuff on the first ship and was out of it. Nathan let Noah take a few loads of good waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to cheap, and Noah squeaked out a win over Matt by a couple of points (and still 13 more than I).
Matthew and Amelia had arrived, so we setup Mecanisburgo and started into the rules. The rules are mostly straight forward, with a couple of questions that we had to go back to the rules for, but not a terrible number. The rules took a good hour though, because of us trying to get a grasp on the complex set of icons and what each thing really meant. After a playing, it mostly made sense, and you really didn't need to use the icon reference card more than a couple of times after the first round. Erik VonBurg arrived right before we started, so we invited him to join us. Matthew covered the rules with him and off we went. Now, for the first turn or so, I'm pretty sure we all had no master strategy, we just played the game and tried to make sense of it. After a while I'd guess Matthew had decided a certain direction to try, but personally, I had no clue and was just trying (poorly) to keep my agents alive. Going into the third turn, we turned up an instant victory card that allowed the last place person the chance to go for a win. We counted up the points and found Erik was out in front by a good amount while Amelia was in last place. She elected to try for the instant win and did end up winning the game as neither Erik nor I couldn't match her power. I'm going to post my thoughts on this game separately, but the general consensus seemed to be that there was a game with potential there, but we didn't hit it.
After that, we opted for something quick and lighter - Liar's Dice - yet another Nathan had not tried before. We bumped out Matthew, then Nathan, then Amelia. Erik then pushed me down to have a 3 to 1 dice advantage and won the game.
Everyone else took off at that point so I asked Nathan if he had one more in him. He did, so I pulled out Hansa, which is just ok for two. The reason though, was to teach him a game we could do PBEM. Given the number of times I had played, it was pretty easy to place my markets in the cities I knew the ship would hit the most and so forth and won easily on the number of markets I had solo. But now, we have something else to distract us when we are sitting at the table playing games.