Saturday 10 April 2010

gaming in photos

28 Mar 2010. Han, Afif and Reza, playing Princes of Florence. This is a classic Euro game by Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich, published in 2000. It is also a poster boy for Ameritrash fans who want to show how low interaction Euro games are. I myself like the game a lot, and I really should play this more. It has been a long time since I last played, and I am glad that I managed to bring it out again.

My city at game end. I had completed 5 works, which is nothing impressive, but I managed to win the game at 61pts. Experience counts. Only Han had played this game before, and only once, and with incorrect rules (my fault).

4 Apr 2010. Race for the Galaxy (with first two expansions). The combination of Contact Specialist and Rebel Pact meant I could settle Military worlds up to 3-defense for free. That was how I managed to settle Rebel Base (6-defense, but I only needed to pay 3 cards). I went with a consume strategy. Galactic Salon was handy for such a strategy - it is basically two powers or two cards in one, because you normally need a card to produce a good, and a card to convert that good to a victory point. Galactic Renaissance jived well with my strategy, giving bonus points based on the victory point chips I had collected. Too bad this was not good enough to beat Michelle's tableau below...

Michelle went for an Alien strategy. Her tableau developed to be a strong military one too. She won many objective tiles, and the 8pt Alien Monolith and 7pt Rebel Homeworld pushed her score to 56pts, comfortably beating my 51pts.

My 3-year-old daughter played with my camera when Michelle and I were playing Agricola with the Farmers of the Moor expansion. These are the fuel tokens from the expansion.

My farm at game end. I had one sick family member because I forgot to get enough fuel to warm the house. Sick family members only score 1pt instead of 3pts. I still had one moor tile on my land.

My Occupations and Improvements. We played the Level 3 complexity game, i.e. with Minor Improvements from both the base game and the expansion, and with Occupations too. I was obviously going with a baker strategy, with Field Watchman and Corn Scoop coming out early, and then Baker, Clay Oven and Stone Oven.

Michelle's farm. She fully utilised her land. She had wanted to build stables, but wasn't able to do so in time.

Michelle had many Occupations.

2 comments:

deck said...

We played Princes of Florence for the first time on Saturday. I suspect that Sean read this blog post first and felt like playing it afterwards. I was quite surprised to win the game with about 65 points or so, and only because of an 8-point Prestige Card for having the least empty spaces.

Ironically, the Prestige would have failed if it were not for Sean's advice to Shan in the last round. Since Shan was holding two works cards, we all expected her to use both actions to play works cards, but she wanted to buy a building and then play a works card instead. Sean advised her that playing both works cards would get her more points even if one of the building requirement doesn't match than buying a building and playing a works card.

I backed Sean up because if Shan had bought another building, she'd have the least unused spaces and I would have failed the Prestige card condition and Sean would have won. Haha.

Hiew Chok Sien 邱卓成 said...

Hey 65pts is a pretty good score for a first time player. How many players did you have? Three? POF is best with 5P, because that's when the auctions can get quite painful (in a good way). If you enjoyed it with 3, you'll likely enjoy it even more with 5.