Game Night

Game Night was Friday for me again this week, so I headed out to the Gamer's Inn. When I arrived, I sat down with Dan Brugman, Noah Antwiller and his brother Miles Antwiller and we finally agreed to start with Rumis, which is short and sweet. Dan, having never played before, was at a disadvantage and Miles made it pretty obvious early on that he'd be winning this game. We played the pyramid, and Miles managed to isolate one whole side to himself. When we tallied it up, it was Miles-18, Charles-15, Noah-13, Dan-5.
Next up, Noah pulled out Citadels and we were joined by Rob Smolka, Amelia Boli, and Matthew Frederick. We pulled out the king and the warlord roles and replaced them with the Emperor and Diplomat roles from the Dark City Expansion. Now, as is likely to happen with this many players (and pretty much any Citadels game), a couple of players got hosed repeatedly and early (specifically Noah and Matthew). Pretty much Noah didn't get to play much in the first 3/4 of the game and by the last part, he simply gave up. I don't think I'll be willing to play this again with anything more than four players, and even then I have loads of other games I'd rather play with exactly four players. I also suspect that this won't see table time with the group for at least a year (if that soon).
After the Citadels fiasco, we decided to pull out something a little lighter - Smarty Party. This is a fun little trivia game that is marred by some sometimes strange answers in their lists. For example, if there were six characters from the Flintstones, you'd think it'd be Fred, Wilma, Barney, Betty, Pebbles and Bam Bam, but it might be not be Pebbles and Bam Bam - it could be Dino and some other random re-occurring character. Minor annoyances aside, this is fun enough to wash out the bad taste from Citadels. Dan and Noah tied for the win.
Dan and Rob went off to catch a movie and Miles had to work in the morning so he left. Noah, Amelia, Matthew and I decided to play Tichu with Amelia and I teaming up against Matthew and Noah. Noah started the game with a Tichu and 95 of the points, making things look not good for us to start the game. After 4 hands, we were down 130-475. After that, Amelia and I roared back with a couple of Tichu 1+2 hands and ended up winning 1055-850.
We broke up at that point, and Amelia and I were joined by Dave Thompson and Paul Contway for a short game of Nexus Ops (we only played to 10 points instead of 12). Amelia was the last player, and didn't immediately find a mine outside her base. I thought this would be a disadvantage to her, but she plowed through all of us for an easy win, hitting 10 well out in front of Dave or I. Had there been one more round, I might have got to 9 points, but would have needed like two more turns after that, as two of my energizer cards were for lava leapers and dragons and thus no help. Neither were any of my secret mission cards. I've commented before that this is a good short Ameri-trash game that should get played more, and I was right, this needs more table time :)