Session Report for Saturday 12/15/2007

6 gamers 7 games

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Uptown

(Marshall, August, Ty, Robert, Nick)

Uptown is an abstract, tile-placement filler. Basically there is a 9x9 gridded board and each player has their own set of 27 tiles. The goal is to play the tiles on the board such that you create the fewest continuous regions (where diagonal doesn't count for anything). Any give tile can only be placed on one of nine squares (e.q. a tile might be playable only on a certain row, or certain column of the board). Opponents tiles can be captured by placing your tile on top of them, but only if doing so doesn't break their chain of tiles into two seperate regions. In other words you can capture from around the periphery of an opponents region as long as you don't split it into two parts. The winner is the player with the fewest regions with ties broken by the fewest captures (in other words you don't want to capture, but sometimes that's a better choice than starting a new region.

The game plays very fast but seems to present a lot of interesting decisions. I happened to luck out and connect my two regions early while forming a think line across the center of the board. This turns out to be a pretty good strategy as a line is not attackable except at the tips. The other players all had regions on either side of my line that they had very little hope of joining.

I was nearly forced to start a second region several times, but managed not to by making numerous captures. At the end of the game four of your tiles will remain umplayed. For me these tiles would each have created a new region, but I was able to hold off on playing them until the end when I didn't have too.

Overall, I found Uptown to be a very pleasant abstract filler that can handle up to five players. It's got randomness certainly, but also seems to present interesting decisions.

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Zooloretto

(Ty, August, Robert)

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Caylus

(Clint, Marshall, Nick

After playing Caylus with different numbers I've figured out that three is probably the sweet spot for this game. Three players minimizes the chaos that can happen between your turns while still maintaining a certain tightness of resources. I probably wouldn't want to play this with five again but three is very enjoyable.

In this game Clint and Nick both went heavily to the Castle so I only built marginally there. I thought I would persue a builder/favors strategy but both Clint and Nick seemed to manage to keep up in the building race so I got no advantage. And I made the rookie mistake of playing to the Jousting field for a favor before collecting my purple cube.

I started to fall pretty far behind and knew the only hope was to build the biggest blue building I could. I began collecting gold and on the last turn of the game built the 25 point building. This was enough to put my back into contention but Clint surged out to a comfortable win based on the favors he one in the final castle section.

Take a look at the board for the Caylus "Premium Edition"

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10 Days in Asia

(Robert, Ty, August) x2

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For Sale

(Robert, Ty, August)

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Vegas Showdown

(Clint, Marshall, August, Robert)

This was my second game of Vegas Showdown and I found it much improved with four players instead of three. In this game I happened to get a few lounges early on, and then two scoring cards came up that awarded points for lounges so I surged out to a lead. I still had a pretty good lead at the end of the game except I didn't fill either my casino or my hotel so the other players mostly caught up. It wasn't until we scored the diamonds that Robert passed me for the win, however. He had three complete diamonds which is worth nine points. That's pretty huge in this game, and very impressive to pull off.

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-- MarshallPhilips - 18 Dec 2007
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