game night report

[quarrel]

First game was 7 Wonders again, due to having a newcomer (as it’s relatively easy to teach) and having seven players total (since many games only support up to five or six). We’ve been meaning to try an unofficial “score as few points as possible” variant, but it’s tricky and needs a full complement of experienced participants, so we just played the standard game.

I randomly drew Halicarnassus for my nation and chose to play the B version, which gives you the ability to play three discarded cards for free as you build your monument, at the expense of gaining only three victory points for it instead of the usual ten that monuments grant. My plan was to go for a big Science score for once. Science cards accelerate in points as you play more of them (and more full sets of them), so both playing cards for free and being able to select from the entire community discard pile should have been beneficial. Alas, two other players also pursued Science, leaving me without enough to make my original plan worthwhile, and nothing else I found made my special ability pay off. I came in second-to-last, ahead of only the newcomer.

Second game was Zendo. It’s more an intellectual exercise than a board game. I found it fun and an interesting change of pace.

Third game was Ticket to Ride. We used the completely basic original American map with no add-ons. I came in a respectable second out of four — over a dozen points ahead of #3 but over two dozen short of the winner. Mainly, I overestimated how quickly the game would end and didn’t draw as many extra destination tickets as I should have in the midgame, whereas the winner accumulated about eight to my four and met all of them. Afterward we got into a heated discussion about how the strategy that player #1 used to get so many points had been toned down on purpose in every later version and expansion of the game, and how it made the game too luck-dependent and narrowed the set of viable strategies too much, and how the game plays completely differently in competitive circles where everyone constantly cuts off other players on purpose to make them lose points for stranded cities, and things basically ended in me getting emotional and yelling at people (to get my point across? I guess?) and needing to apologize.