Well, I won the dice game... (Mexica, Dominion: Intrigue x2)

Shemp took a page from Luch's playbook and has decided to select the same thing for a few picks in a row. Whereas Luch was picking Die Macher, Shemp chose Mexica and Tikal for the second time.

However, just like last time, we only actually played one of the two (Mexica, in this case).

Mexica

At the end of our last session of this, Shemp remarked that there would be nothing preventing a player from placing buildings all around the board right from the starting space (before any canals were up). He decided to try this out, despite the obvious danger of getting the buildings he put out there surrounded and rendered useless. It worked fairly well. By placing buildings in every corner he ensured that he had a presence in all the regions we were creating around the board. We nicknamed the technique "carpet bombing the board". I suppose we could have spent points to put canals around them and cut him off, but there is so much you want to do in the game that it seemed too inefficient.

The board developed is a fairly screwy way. It was a mess of canals, and the land was nearly choked out well before the end of the game. I kept playing defensively, placing buildings in front of the bridges I built, etc. It meant that I ended up having to spend most turns teleporting... a rather inefficient way of playing.

Shemp built a commanding lead, and won the game in a distant first place. Kozure was in second place while me and Bharmer brought up the rear (of course, he had never played before... I had no such excuse).

Dominion/ Dominion: Intrigue

The Mexica game lasted a couple of hours, so we didn't really have time for Tikal. Shemp requested our latest go-to game for this situation... Dominion.

In our first session, we had the Saboteur, the Torturer, the Swindler and other similar types. There were no extra buys, and few extra actions. It was looking like it would be a long, drawn out affair. I latched onto buying lots of swindlers, and managed to play one just about every round in the game. This put a lot of curses into people's hands, it was burning through the stacks of cards on the table, but wasn't really getting me anywhere. I ended the game by exhausting 3 piles of cards, something that rarely happens in our group. Unfortunately, I was hoping to do it before people started buying provinces but it didn't work. When the game ended, we all scored pretty low but I was dead last with only 10 points. Bharmer won.

As an aside, we were arbitrarily rolling an 8 sided die and two 6 sided dice to determine turn order (geek enough for ya?). Going into this session, I rolled 20. This would be the pinnacle of my achievements this evening.

In the second session, things were more upbeat. There was festival, laboratory and others that provided plenty of additional actions and buys. I had an idea to combine the bridge and the workshop, allowing me to take duchies each time I made the combo. It worked pretty well, but it wasn't enough. I came in second with 32 points, while Bharmer (again) won... this time only ahead of me by 3.

So, I ended the evening winless. My biggest success was the dice game for turn order. Sigh.