Well, I went to B&P as planned on Saturday, had a great time as usual. Saw Richard B and Matt there, but I’d already met up with Geoff Hardingham and David Smith before they arrived so didn’t actually play any games with them.

Here’s my results and comments :

Antike

1st Mike Head 8
2nd= Geoff Hardingham, David Smith, Guy Arnold 7 5th Andrew Tampion 3

Yippee, finally won a game of Antike! I was Greece on the English (East) Board. My original thoughts on this game remain the same, it’s a superb game in just about every respect except for the victory conditions, they’re set just 1 VP too high. Unless someone gets a quick win through the negligence of other players, that last point can be an awful struggle. Our game lasted about 3.5 hours, the struggle from 7 to 8 VP took about 35 minutes (I wasn’t the first to reach 7 actually, the chap who did probably deserved to win as he had a nice balance of aggression and know-how advances but he then ran out of steam) where a 3 hour game would have been perfect.

Geoff said he felt a bit ‘piggy in the middle’, as Assyria is in 5-player, but he did okay right until the end and could have done better perhaps had he been more aggressive early on. One particular problem with getting 8 VP’s on the East Board is that I think it is much more difficult to get to

Caylus

1st Chris Dawe 69
2nd Geoff Hardingham 65
3rd Mike Head 59
4th Chris Dollin 56
5th Andrew Tampion 33

The twice I’ve done well at this game somehow I’ve felt that, rather than getting into a strategy, I’ve got into a rhythm, where I’ve been able to work the meeple placements into an efficient cycle which is able to cope with what the other players do. Sadly, it never happened in this game, it did happen for Chris D and I wasn’t surprised that he won, though the gap to Geoff and myself was perhaps closer that I suspected. Chris D played excellently but everybody else helped him because he occupied the Pub far too long for my comfort, I kicked him out once but nobody else did it and I couldn’t lose the tempo by continuing to do all the work in that respect.

An odd game though, with many brown buildings being built (the grey architect was built very late I think), only 5 gold produced and only one blue building (mine!) built, right on the last turn. A long game again, took about 2.5 hours, but didn't drag at all.

I finished off with a new group of players with a couple of games of a filler card game Alles in Eimer (Rio Grande version is Bucket King), fairly amusing but not good enough to want to recommend as a purchase.