Session Report for Saturday, 07/22/2006

6 Players, 5 Games

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Caylus

(Drew, Ty, Johan, Kevin K., Marshall)

MarshallPhilips -

Five master architects competed to build the Castle and town of Caylus. It was pretty much a learning game for everybody so we played a pretty friendly and fast game (i.e. nobody ever moved the bailiff backwards to cut off somebody's worker). I played for a castle building strategy trying to win the castle favor every turn, with my favors I pushed up the victory point and goods tracks (the goods tracks is highly derided on BGG and I'd have to agree, one would seem to be much better off spending his favors on another track. Next time I think I would go for the money or building track.) In order to build at the castle I had to forgoe constructing buildings (except for one stone building which I built.)

Drew went for a blue building strategy and in the most clever move of the game build a residence then built over the Lawyer building (the one that lets you build residences). This cut off everyone else from making a residence and ensured that only Drew would be able to build a blue victory point building (because they must be built on residences).

Overall the game went much quicker than I expected mainly, I think, because we kept pushing the provost forward at the rate of two spaces per turn. A longer game would have favored the builders because they would have gotten more points out of their buildings.

I suspect we'll be playing more Caylus in the future.

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Taj Mahal

(Drew, Chad, Kevin K.)

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Power Grid (France)

(Marshall, Ty, Johan)

This was a pretty fun game of powergrid. The number 50 plant (fusion -> 6 cities) was sold for $105!!! In the end everyone connected to 17 cities but I was the only one to power all 17. That brings up a strategy point. It's easier to acquire cities than plant capacity. Given a large amount of money there's no limit to the number of cities you can buy but there's a limit to how much you can upgrade your plant capacity (if at all!). That means it's more important to get plant capacity than cities. As long as you don't fall too far behind you can catch up in cities but you may never catch up in plant capacity.

Believe it or not this is the designer of Power Grid

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Tsuro

(Chad, Kevin K.)

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Squad Leader

(Chad, Kevin K.)

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-- MarshallPhilips - 23 Jul 2006
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