1st June 04.....................................................5 Players
We split into 2 groups tonight. This was a foreshortened session because Steve had to go and the children were getting tired.

St Petersburg – 90 minutes

St P is a finely balanced game which is very cruel if you don’t get your income established early on. The player order for the first round is important and I think Steve suffered getting last choice on the first builder round. I managed to get all 10 nobles which took me ahead of Dave at the end of the game.

Sunken City – 60 minutes

I have played several games of Sunken City over the last month and I really enjoy it. Daniel and Alice are proficient players and I understand they had fun playing each other. Daniel built the final building Alice needed on the opposite side of the board from her village, it has never occurred to me to place the buildings others need, I just worry about my own treasures. Daniel is a sharp kid who does not just follow convention.

8th June 04.....................................................3 Players
There were only the 3 of us tonight but we are looking forward to an expected turnout of 6 or 7 for next week.

Acquire – 120 minutes

We are all fond of Acquire. It hits the table about once every 6 months, not the most frequently played game but I bet it will still be getting played long after other current games have lost favour. In this playing nobody went rounds with no money. Mergers where evenly spaced throughout the game so things stayed kind of fluid. At mid game Dave had a difficult choice to make, he could have taken shares in the main chain preventing me from taking ownership from Mike. It would have cost Dave a comparatively small amount of money to do so but would have gained him nothing. It transpired that this was the king making moment. Dave, had he taken one of the Zeta shares, would have given the victory to Mike due to the massive £10k swing in points for Zeta 2^nd place and 1^st place payouts at game end.

16th June 04.....................................................5 Players

I had a great time last night. It is nice to be back up to 5 of us after a couple of weeks with just 3. We had hoped to increase attendance by moving the night to Wednesday I think it will happen and it was just coincidence that following the change attendance actually dropped!

I have been grouping together old copies of these session summary reports and publishing them to my own web space. Dave D has recently done a neat job of linking these pages into the main club site. I can now update the archive every month and it will be available via the club site. This will not interfere with Dave’s site plans but will make us look a bit more active to the outside world. Once the archived data gets beyond a certain level it will be desirable to change the presentation ie to be able to quickly look up results by game or simply the number of times we have played a game. I think we will be ok as we are for about a year.

Samarkand – 80 minutes  bgg

This is an interesting Sid Sackson game, a unique design. I enjoyed this playing more than the only other time I played which was over a year ago, it maybe takes a little long to play for its light weight. It was hard to keep track of money during the course of play but I think we all took Dave D to be leading throughout, not that there was anything we could do about it. It transpired that in fact prior to the last sale Dave C had actually been ahead. One thing was for sure, I was well out of contention.

Web of Power – 60 minutes

Steve’s was the only newbie. I like this game the more I play, it feels like a mid weight two hour strategy game squashed into one hour. By contrast Samarkand is more like a light 40 minute game stretch to fill 80 minutes (that was just a cheap jab). This game was one where the advisors scored big. Multiple players shared dominance of several of the courts which pushed up the total points dished out at the game end.

23rd June 04.....................................................5 Players
Next week could clash with the football, depending on tonight’s result. The Wednesday meeting will be off if the soccer is on. We might meet up on Tuesday instead but no firm plans have been made.

We just played the one game tonight but what a game.

Princes of Florence – 120 minutes  bgg

I have been looking forward to playing Princes of Florence for many months and the game did not disappoint. I hope we don’t wait as long for it to make its next appearance. Steve was the only one new to the game though I had only played once before. None of us had played for a long time. Dave C explained the rules to Steve. I got the builder in the first round which was my pre-game plan (beyond that I was just winging it). Dave C got the first Jester for what I suspect was a very reasonable price of 500 florins. By the 5^th round we had each got 1 Jester and the game was very tight. In fact the game could have gone to any of us through till the last round. Dave C lifted his position in the 7th round by producing 2 works, this would have given him the game if Steve and I had not had a prestige card each giving bonuses of 8 and 6.

I am busting with enthusiasm for this game. I consider it to be on a par with Puerto Rico and Amen Re. These are games with several elements which mesh together perfectly IMO.

30th June 04.....................................................7 Players
It was a two table turnout this week with 7 us splitting into a table of 3 and a table of 4. It was good to see Peter again who I know has a busy calendar and a long way to travel to get to Halesowen. I understand Tony is going to be a regular which is great news. We should be able to run 2 concurrent games a lot more often than has been the case in the past.

La Strada – 30 minutes x2

Odd that when the vast majority of games originate from mainland Europe we get a game designed by an Englishman and he decides to give the game a foreign title. I don’t know a lot about this game. Tonight was its first playing within the group. I gather that Steve was a bit under whelmed by the experience. At a 30 minute play time it does not have to set the world alight to get some play as an end of evening filler. It was played twice back to back.

San Juan – 60 minutes

I have never known scores as low as these. Steve mentioned that the 6 buildings seemed to come out with the gold mine and not go into anyone’s hand. The player(s) who ended the game must have had 12 buildings averaging less than 2 points each!

Alexandros – 60 minutes

This was the first playing within the group of Alexandros, Mike’s birthday game. This is an abstract game with a fairly loose theme where the aim is to levy taxes from the land you claim. A game with a neat simple mechanism and a mission to claim territory is always going to be a hit with me but boy did this game have a big slab of chaos when played with 4 players. There was no chance of having even the remotest notion of what the board would look like when your turn came round again so it was all about playing for the moment. There was an ongoing decision to be made regarding how many cards to horde and when to run your stash low. I think we were all in agreement that this is a healthy addition to our repertoire of 3 or 4 player one hour games.

Vom Kap Bis Kairo – 60 minutes  bgg

The game is won by the fist person to build a railway through Africa. This 8 card race was nicely themed, with our progress clearly illustrated on the table in front of us. It is a hard game to initially grasp and the necessity of keeping a pen and paper record of points is off putting (to me). Once I got over my personal negative vibes I found this to be a real smasher. I have made some notes at the bottom of the page regarding Trophy points awarded for draws.

Next week is the first Wednesday of a new month. The Trophy points go back to zero.

It is to be noted that only Dave D and I attended all this months sessions. Final trophy scores for June: 

Average attendance 5

Trophy points are calculated separately for each game by multiplying the game length in minutes by the number of participants and dividing that figure by a player’s final position. All players’ points go back to zero at the end of each month. There are 3 special situations that are dealt with below: 
 
   1. Points awarded for draws are calculated by averaging the points that would normally be scored for the drawn position and the skipped positions. Eg in a 6 player 100 minute game the results are Player A gets 15 victory points, B-15, C-15, D-10, E-10 and F 5, so there is a 3 way draw for 1st place, a 2 way draw for 4th place and F comes 6th.  Players A,B and C will get (600+300+200)/3, players D and E will get (150+120)/2 and player F will get 100 trophy points.
   2. In games that involve team play, a team is a player, for the purposes of calculating trophy points. Eg in a 100 minute game of Scotland Yard there is one player playing Mr X and 3 players playing the detectives, the winner (either the player playing Mr X or the players playing the detectives) gets 200 trophy points and the loser(s) get 100 trophy points (each).
   3. In some cases the results of a game might be unclear. Eg Games that are not completed or the results are hard to call because of a rule misinterpretation discovered half way through play. In these cases a common sense result will be called. In the cases where the decision is controversial we can reach a solution by the consent of the effected players and if an arbitrator is required the ultimate decision goes to the player who is least effected by the controversy.