by Sharon Khan
I was able to attend the day part of Gradpad this month, after a couple of months off. I started by suggesting Terra Mystica, which I was hoping to play with Ray, but he was slightly late. I found others who were interested in playing it, one of them new to the game, and we set up a 4 player game, only for Ray to walk in and join us. We decided, reluctantly, to make it a 5 player game, despite concerns on length, but before we'd got much further another player walked in also keen to learn it, so we split into two threes - me playing with Lee and Ray. Ray's copy had the expansion in, and although I wasn't keen on playing the expansion itself, I agreed to play one of the new boards at least. I was dealt mermaids again (I seem to have played them a lot recently), while Ray got Darklings and Lee Halflings, which was a good race for a first game. I explained the rules and Lee was soon up and running. He managed to build himself two towns, but wasn't able to connect his two regions. Ray abandoned one of his starting houses, but built a huge network from his second one, but I was able to make mine one bigger. I also managed to get top on all four tracks, as neither of the others were playing for them - Ray using his men for digging, and Lee focusing on other aspects of the game. These end of game points were able to put me ahead of Ray, although he did better from in-game points.After this I spotted a copy of Roll for the Galaxy, and asked to play it. Timothy had played it once before, so managed to explain the rules, although I think we were all a bit hazy on the details, and Ray decided to abandon playing before we started, leaving 4 of us to play. I made the mistake of trying to build a 6 alien world with only 7 dice - which took me far too many turns and lost me momentum. Meanwhile Timothy seemed to be doing amazing stuff with lots of small production worlds and consuming for lots of VPs every turn, and won easily.
After lunch three of us set up Notre Dame. I went for rat killing and lots of cubes and cash, while Robin was being overrun with rats! Timothy managed to get away with being the only person in Notre Dame in the second round, and we thought this might win him the game, especially as he had a park going for most of the game too, but at final scoring I was just a few points ahead of him, with Robin just a couple of points behind that - a very close game!
Then there were three tables of people milling around choosing games. I ended up joining a game of Tokaido. I'd heard this was a beautiful game, and I suppose it was very pretty if you care about artwork. Gameplay wise though I have to say I was very unconvinced by it. There just didn't seem to be a way of setting up a "strategy". Timothy just always picked the back spot he could and won by miles, and I think this was probably a good idea! I tried to use my bonus, of extra VPs from hot springs and cats, by focussing on them, but didn't get as many in-game VPs as the others, so had a lot of catching up to do at end-game.
We then pulled out Stone Age. One player had played before but only once, so was a bit hazy on some of the rules, while the other three of us knew it better, but it became clear early on that it was between Timothy and I. Timothy went for my usual strategy, going for farms, and tools, and just generally getting lots of points from being efficient. I ended up doing a starvation strategy, which is something I almost never do, after breeding kept getting left, and I got some early cards which gave me bonuses for number of people. Some terrible food rolls with 9 men meant that I really wasn't likely to feed, so I decided not to bother any more, and just starved and instead monopolised goods - annoying a couple of people one round by blocking clay with my 7 men after they'd gone for huts that needed clay. Timothy won though.
As we were finishing the final round the next table set up Roll for the Galaxy with 2 players, saying that someone else would join them probably, so Timothy and I did so as our game finished! This game went rather better for me in terms of play, but I was still third of 4 players at end-game!
I had just time for one more game before I had to leave, and we settled on Dominion, with Michael using one of his random selections with cards from all sorts of editions! Timothy and I both made good use of a card that when you discarded a treasurer you got +3 cards, +1 action, which combined with a trash card, and a reaction card that gave us gold when we trashed cards made a nice combo. However Timothy was able to get his deck working much earlier than mine, and bought a Colony before I'd even bought a Platinum, and ending on 60 points to my 41.