gaming in photos

22 Aug 2009. Pandemic. At game setup, Karachi was already infected to Level 3. I have some colleagues in Karachi. I hope they are OK. (sorry, lame joke...)

Michelle was the researcher (brown), who could give a card to another player even if they are located at the city depicted on the card. I was the dispatcher (purple but supposed to be pink), who could move another player's pawn or fly a pawn to meet another pawn. We did something illegal in Bogota.

This was what we did. Michelle spent her 4 actions to give me 4 cards, so that by the next turn I was ready to cure two diseases. I had thought that I only needed to discard down to the hand limit of 7 cards after the draw card phase of my turn. After the game I checked the rules again and realised that if you exceed 7 cards after someone else gives you cards, you need to immediately discard down to 7. Well, despite this mistake which benefited us, we still lost the game. We were playing at hard difficulty level.

This was how we lost. Too many outbreaks, and we ran out of black disease cubes.

Yspahan. This photo is very disorienting, because I was sitting at the "northern" edge of the board. The mix of the shading of the buildings drawn on the game board and the real shadows of the game components (green cubes and white pawn) causes confusion to the eyes.

I had built the building that gave addition $2 whenever you collected money. I was rich rich RICH! (yellow discs are coins)

Michelle on the other hand kept collecting camels. If this were Arabian Agricola she would have scored the full 4 point for the camel category.

Another probably even more disorienting photo. I quite like the board of Yspahan. It's beautiful.

Michelle won the game, and this contributed very much to it. She scored 22 points, plus 6 points from a special building, for the cubes she had placed in this district in Week 3.

Ticket to Ride. We played with the Big Cities variant that comes with the USA 1910 expansion. I kept all four of my initial tickets. All were big tickets, and all required connecting cities from east and west. This was the early game, and I found myself being blocked or threatened to be blocked by Michelle all over the place. Look and my green trains and you'll see how desperate I was. I had four disjointed segments.

Surprisingly, I went on to win the game. I had exactly enough trains to complete all four of my tickets, not a single one more. If I were short by just one train the results would have been disastrous. Michelle drew tickets near game end, and failed to complete a 16 point ticket, which was painful. She hadn't expected me to finish using up my trains so quickly. When she drew tickets, I was only a few cards away from being able to play my three 6-length routes and one 2-length route.