November 27, 2007

Seven people played seven different games tonight.

• Chateau Roquefort (Burg Appenzell) - Played by Hal, Phil, and myself. This is a cute game about mice searching an abandoned castle for cheese. Each player controls four mice, and starts the game with one of his four mice on the board. Rooftops block the view of most of the board. On a turn, a player has four actions. He can choose from 1) peeking under a rooftop, 2) moving a mouse one space, 3) adding a mouse to an unoccupied corner space, or 4) shifting one row or column of the tiles that make up the game board. Most of the tiles are printed with one of several types of cheese, some of the tiles are just blank, and a few of the tiles have holes in them. If a player can get two of his mice on tiles with a matching type of cheese, the player gets a marker for that type of cheese. In the standard game, collecting four different types of cheeses wins. If a player shifts the tiles so that a hole moves under one of the mice, that mouse drops through the floor and out of the game. If a player gets down to one mouse, the game ends, and the player with the most types of cheese (excluding the player down to one mouse) wins. Phil won by getting 4 types of cheese.
• Kanaloa - This is a four player version of the two-player game Kahuna. The board consists of 16 islands, each island with 3, 5, or 7 places to place a bridge. Players play cards to place bridges to connect islands. If a player controls a majority of bridges to an island, he takes control of that island, and kicks off all bridges belonging to other players. The game is played in two rounds, and at the end of each round, players score one point for each island they control, plus one point for each bridge space to that island that they don’t control (so you score maximum points by just barely maintaining your majority of bridges). Phil had a huge lead at the end of the first round, with me in second, and Hal in third with no points at all. In the second round, Hal made a huge come-back, while I continued my middling performance, and Phil really got hammered. Phil still managed to win by a narrow margin. Final scores were Phil 22, Eric 18, Hal 16.
• Poison - Played by Lance, Joey, Tim, and Katie. This time they played by the correct rules. Lance won.
• Mmm... Brains - Played by Lance, Joey, Tim, and Katie. Lance won.
• Phoenix - Phil had to leave after Kanaloa, so Hal and I played Phoenix. Hal finished first in the first and third rounds, while I finished first in the second round. Final score was Hal 23, Eric 19.
• Munckin Cthulhu - Played by Lance, Joey, Tim, and Katie. With Lance and Tim already cultists, Katie lost a fight with a monster that turned her into a cultist, giving Joey the win as the only non-cultist.
• Fibonacci - Hal and I played two games of this great, but relatively unknown, two-player abstract. I won the first game, and Hal won the second.

Our next session will be December 11.