by Ben Bateson
Seeing as Tony evidently has his grumpy hat on this week*, I shall attempt to provide a more glowing portrait of last week's gaming:Setting up promptly at 7pm in order to avoid the nascent roadworks gave us chance to sample three main-eventers this week, and we started with my current 'hot game': the tragically simple, but maddeningly engaging, Kingdom Builder. The scoring-card draw left us devoid of any Nomads cards to confuse things, but there was the distinctly annoying confluence of Farmers (score points for having lots of houses on the board with your fewest) and Lords (outright win boards by having the most). A juggling act was called for: Dave and Becky struggled by backing themselves into corners and John rather ran away with things at the end.
Tony sniffed his way through the conclusion to this game, before pointing out we had rather a dearth of games for five, due to an embarrassing mathematical lapse on my part. Never mind - we did have the ageless Puerto Rico.
An early foray into coffee did me no good whatsoever as I pursued money, but was continually denied by a wily Dave to my right (in only his second game, mark you). Tony alleged to require a full rules explanation, but certainly did well enough to tie with me for second on 47. The top place was an utter thriller - 53 points each, until both John and Becky did a hasty recount to avoid the nebulous 'money tie-break', and Becky found an extra point (totally legitimately, I might add) for victory. Great game - why on earth we'd want to play half-a-dozen big name recent releases over this is beyond me.
With the pale ale disappearing like nobody's business, I volunteered to get in a round (and the nth and n+1th bag of pork scratchings), and was utterly delighted** to find Paperclip Railways - the stationery precursor to Snowdonia - hitting the table. Resisting the temptation to play silly buggers by immediately plonking the Henge down and going to play solo KingBrick, I went for an ultimately poor suburb strategy, combined with one ultra-long route for pure points and a river placement designed to annoy other people (this at least worked). John thought for longer than I had considered rationally possible in this game, but perhaps it was just about worth it, for he won by a fair old bit over the game's designer. The slightly broken Area 51 card helped a fair bit, mind you.
Paperclips tidied up (and isn't there something vaguely ironic about the act of tidying up paperclips?) and lakes re-packed, we set out into the pouring rain and sleet that traditionally marks summertime in the Welsh marches.
* Or, in fairness, perhaps he was dazzled by the previous night's Risk Legacy - a bloodbath of vengeance, sabotage and puns relating to body parts.
** Well, no, not really. But to hell with it - at least I could drink beer and not have to think about it.