Undefeated

Well, Shemp pulled off another come-from-behind win in Macao, which makes it 5 wins for 5 plays for him. 100%. Undefeated.

Impressive... most impressive.

We also played In the Year of the Dragon (Easy won) and Jungle Speed (Bharmer and Easy won one each).

I had to content myself with two (close) second place finishes in the non-filler games.

Which brings me to the interesting question... which games are we, as members of this group, good at?

There are many games which I enjoy but I'm not necessarily good at. Power Grid, for example, I usually come in the middle of the pack (used to be middle-high end, but recent plays have left me lower than usual). Conversely, one of the games which I almost put in the "will not play willingly" category, Phoenicia, I actually had my own personal highest win rate for. What does it say about me that the game I win most often I happen to dislike? Fortunately, (or maybe unfortunately for my win record), Phoenicia has been traded away.

I think I've got a reasonably good win rate at Railroad Tycoon. I enjoy it, which usually assists in getting me to play better. I'm also usually pretty decent at Tikal.

As mentioned in previous entries, when El Grande was introduced to the group, I had a fairly high win ratio. Over time, that edge has been lost and now I'm frequently middling.

Shemp, as mentioned, is trending high wins at Macao.

This weekend, at TABSCON, I had the opportunity to play Race for the Galaxy with two people who play it a lot. I was creamed. Seriously creamed, twice in a row. Point spreads of something like 70 or 80 to my 30-ish. I felt like... well, I'd use some sports analogy here but I don't know sports teams well enough... the Nigerian Woman's Hockey Team up against Canada... or Canada's soccer team up against Spain. I thought I was not bad at RftG, but either I just had two seriously bad runs of luck, or those guys are super-geniuses. Now, granted, we were playing with two expansions, one of which I hadn't played before, but I was not in the running here.

One nice thing about going to places like TABSCON, it exposes you to playing skill levels outside your "regular" group. Generally I've found, much to my satisfaction, I do pretty well against other groups, save in games where it's obvious they play a particular game a lot.

I think it's clear, if you're a regular reader, that I'm not a "play only for the win" kinda guy. I try to win, for sure, but for me, it's the social atmosphere, friendly competition and sense of thematic engagement that draws me to board gaming.

But sometimes... sometimes... I just want that first place finish, dang it!

Hey WAGsters (or readers), what are the games that you're good at?

Military advantage = win (Through the Ages)

Life's become real busy lately, so writing this blog is tougher than it used to be. Sorry if things are getting sporadic.

Last week we played Through the Ages, a game I like some aspects of but which ultimately is not one of my favorites. One of the reasons is because I dislike the aggression system, and another is related to the first: In my experience, the player who gets the lead in military strength wins and the player who is in last has a really rough road ahead of them.

Now, I should add that in the games I've played, we have often truncated the game for lack of time. It's entirely possible that something in the third age balances out trying an idea strategy or a culture strategy against the advantage of going military in the first two ages. Maybe those strategies require longer to mature, for example.

Anyway, I was the lucky beneficiary of a winning military strength strategy. I started with Homer and tried to focus on always being in the lead for strength and also having solid culture generation. I built the railroads and discovered professional sports and enlisted James Cook to give me massive culture through the many colonies I had controlled (using the aforementioned military advantage). Shemp got beat up on a few times. Sorry about that buddy.

Kozure did mention when we wrapped up that his engine was just starting to ramp up and he would have benefited greatly from playing out the third age. Who knows?

Threeny Madness! (Ra, Glory to Rome, Beowulf, Dominion)

Shemp's pick this week, and he went for Threeny Madness (a play on "weeny madness", the name we used to give Magic decks that focussed on many small creatures). Turns out many of the games played aren't particularly "weeny", but what can you do?

Ra

First up was Ra, with Tilli playing instead of Kozure. Auction games are often subject to groupthink, and so I think everyone was somewhat surprised at how differently me and Shemp evaluated things compared to Tilli (who would typically play outside our group). In particular, it is my habit to purchase many smaller lots early rather than go long and hope for quantity. At first, it looked like it was a losing strategy... Tilli had a huge first round and Shemp and I scored very little. As the game wore on, Ra looked with dissaproval at those wanting quantity over quality and rewarded me with an enormous last round for the win.

Glory to Rome

Kozure stepped back in and Shemp chose perennial favorite Glory to Rome. I've often said that this game is characterized by a new "unbalanced" combo every game. Just to prove me wrong, this session didn't have that. We were all building away and minding our own business when suddenly all the building sites had been used and the game ended. Another odd thing: None of us had a single piece of material in the vault. Shemp thought he had me based on the influence I had gathered from building, but what he hadn't noticed was that I had built the ... (I don't recall the name, but it gives me 1 VP for each 2 materials in the stockpile). This sneakery allowed me to surpass Shemp by 1 and win the game.

Beowulf

A few weeks ago we were wondering if Beowulf with 3 would be any good. Having now played it, I must say that it is! Knizia distributed the episodic rewards very well so that there is as much interest in the 3 player auction as the 4 or 5 player.

In the early episodes, luck was shining on Shemp as he was making out quite well at all the risking challenges. Kozure also appeared to have a persistently large hand of cards. I struggled early in the game but game but found my footing about a third of the way. Through sheer dumb luck I won an episode with a single card from my hand. This reward allowed me to snowball my successes and soon I felt like I was doing really well. Going into the battle with the dragon, I had a hand of 10-15 cards ALL of which could be used in the battle (i.e. just fists and axes and wilds). I don't often do well at this game, but clearly this was my evening!

Dominion

We ended, as we often do, with Dominon. Shemp noticed that the was a themed deck called "Hand Madness!", so being unable to resist the tie in with the evening's theme he chose it. As you'd expect, it's a deck that has players manipulating the number of cards in their own and their opponent's hands quite a lot. Dominion is another game I typically don't do well in, but unfortunately this time the result was in line with the odds... I came in last after an unsuccessful attempt to pull off a bureaucrat + Council room combo. It didn't help that Shemp was constantly playing Militias to keep my handsize down. I unfortunately do not remember who actually did win, however.