gaming in photos

14 Feb 2009. I didn't expect to buy Um Reifenbreite after playing it at Carcasean boardgame cafe back in Kota Kinabalu. But Chong Sean offered me a good price and I couldn't resist. Also I think it's a game I can play with my children when they are older. This game is only available in the German version, so I had to download the English translations of the event cards before I could play my copy. I did it the easy way. I put the cards into card sleeves, and then the English translations on small pieces of paper into them too. No stickers required.

I didn't put these energy cards into card sleeves. I prefer to play games without card sleeves. I like the Joker cards (on the right). These are cards you can use on any rider on your team, and the artist literally drew a joker on them.

15 Feb 2009. I play Carcassonne with my 3-year-old daughter. The good thing about playing with her is we don't need to worry about the confusing farmer scoring rule. We don't score at all! We just take turns placing tiles to build the landscape of Carcassonne. We often don't even bother to place our meeples. In this photo she wanted to place the barn exactly this way, because she thought the barn door was a tunnel through which the road could run.

15 Feb 2009. When Michelle and I play Galaxy Trucker, we play 3 rounds, with Spaceships II, III and IIIA (as opposed to I, II and III). This is more challenging. In this photo I lost one very big chunk of the right side of my spaceship, including crew members and goods. Ouch...

22 Feb 2009. Agricola. Michelle's very nice 42-point farm. No wasted space at all.

These were her cards. They seemed to be rather unrelated, but they worked quite well together.

22 Feb 2009. Lord of the Rings with the Battlefields expansion. I was Frodo and Michelle was Sam. Michelle was rather distracted during the game because of the children, so she wasn't very focused. The game was tough, and not being able to concentrate made things worse. We didn't even make it past Shelob's Lair, the second last scenario board.

The top row are the 5 enemies that can appear on the battlefield board for the Moria scenario board. For each scenario board there are 5 enemies with different characteristics. The backs of these enemy pieces show a section of the scenario board.

Battlefields "completes" the fellowship of the ring. Boromir, Legolas, Gimli, Aragorn and Gandalf. These characters did previously appear as feature cards, even in the base game, but now they are pieces that can be played on the battlefield boards.

1 Mar 2009. Michelle and I had a very close game of Through the Ages. This was in the middle of Age II. I was amused to see 4 leaders appearing so close on the card row. Later Michelle took James Cook.

At one point I had too many stones and couldn't use them quickly enough. I managed to avoid corruption for many turns, but eventually my anti-corruption drive failed for one turn and I lost 2 stones due to "rasuah" (bribes, in Malay). Well, I guess that's not too bad.

My empire, at the end of the game.

My wonders and special technologies.

My past and current leaders.

This was how the game ended. Only two points apart! I was white and Michelle was red. These were the four final event cards. There were a few key actions near game end that could have swayed the game either way. I started building the First Space Flight wonder quite early, but completed it only on my last turn, because I wanted to make sure I played as many technology cards as possible before that to maximise the value of this wonder. It eventually got me 30pts. Michelle had one Age II action card that gave 4pts. Unfortunately she held it for a little too long, and by the time she wanted to play it, Age III had ended and she was forced to discard it before being able to use it. On my second last turn, overall I was militarily weaker, but my army was worth 10 strength and Michelle's 5 strength (most of her military strength came from technologies, wonders and colonies). I played an aggression against Michelle successfully, sacrificing all my soldiers, to destroy 2 of her computers (labs). I was hoping there would be some impact at game-end scoring. Then on Michelle's next turn, the event came up which awarded 10pts to whoever was more technologically advanced. This effectively gave me a 20pt lead.

Michelle's empire at game-end.

Michelle only had 2 leaders. She had more colonies though.

Michelle's wonders and special technologies. See how many gave her military strength (sword and shield icon).

Our culture rating and science rating. My culture rating was higher because of Game Designer. My science rating was higher because I had destroyer Michelle's two Computers (which would have given her 10 science points per turn). Michelle had Einstein as her leader, and Einstein gave her a lot of culture points. 3 culture points per technology played doesn't sound like much, but she was able to play very many technology cards. I was militarily much weaker by game end because I had sacrificed all my soldiers to launch that successful aggression against Michelle.