The huskies meet

Sunday 12 Jul 2020. Benz, Ruby, Xiaozhu and Edwin came over to play. They are all my ex-colleagues, and because of boardgames, we became good friends too. Huskies were our company mascot when we worked at the same company. We are now working at different places, but we still meet up once in a while to play and chat.

Pandemic is a game with a special place in our hearts. My friends got into boardgames because of Pandemic. When they learnt that I had this game, they were curious to try it. That was how I introduced boardgames to them. Later, when the Pandemic Legacy games were released, this group of friends played with me and we completed both Season 1 and 2 together, over many fun sessions. We are now looking forward to the third in the series, Season 0, the prequel.

This time we met up to play, we wanted to play basic Pandemic again, for old times' sake. My copy is the first edition, probably not as pretty as the later versions, but it has sentimental value to me.

To make our game relevant to current events, during game setup I intentionally picked Shanghai (one of the cities closest to Wuhan) to seed with three disease cubes. Normally the setup is random. Later during our game the red disease was first to get cured. In fact we completely eradicated it - no more red cubes on the board. 

Ruby, Benz, Xiaozhu and Edwin. Ruby drew the Scientist character, which meant she could find a cure using four cards of the same colour instead of five. We all tried to pass cards to her and let her focus on finding cures.

One problem with the first edition of the game is the board is a tad small and the pieces are a tad big. When you need to place more than a few pieces at the some location, they won't fit. I prefer to stack the disease cubes like I'm building skyscrapers. It saves space, and it's a good visual cue to see how bad things are.

The last disease we needed to cure was black. We had neglected it for some time and things were getting out of hand. We were at risk of domino effect outbreaks.

Eventually we did beat the game, but things got pretty hairy at one point. We were down to two black cubes remaining in the general supply. One more black outbreak and we would have lost the game. There were a few card draws which were life-and-death. At the time Benz had collected five black cards and would soon be able to cure the black disease. However before his turn came, Ruby still had to do one more infection round. She had to draw three infection cards. If any of those had been one of the black cities with three black cubes, an outbreak would have been triggered and the game would have ended in a loss. We had been quite lucky throughout the game. Things went smoothly, and we even managed to eradicate two diseases, red and yellow. Yet we still got into a precarious situation. It was nerve-racking.

This is Ticket To Ride: Europe. One of our to-do items for this particular meet-up was to give it a go. Ticket To Ride: Japan is out, and Benz and Ruby intend to get a copy. However it is not a stand-alone game. They would need to buy a copy of either Ticket To Ride, or Ticket To Ride: Europe too. They had tried Ticket To Ride. Now they needed to try Ticket To Ride: Europe as well in order to make a decision.

In the photo above, Xiaozhu played black, and Edwin yellow. When they started claiming routes, they found that they were aiming for nearby cities. They hurriedly claim routes, worried that they might get blocked by each other. Their routes intertwined for quite some distance eventually, like a DNA strand.

Benz applied a card hoarding strategy this time. We joked that he already had half the deck in his hand, and that was probably not far from the truth. The rest of us were close to running out of cards to draw. The draw deck had to be reshuffled frequently. We couldn't find the colours we wanted, because many of them were probably still being held by Benz. It was a relief when he eventually started playing cards and placing trains onto the board. He claimed that long 8-train route between Stockholm and Petrograd which was worth 21VP. He claimed many longer routes and scored the most from routes. At game end, he came in #2, only a few points behind the winner. It seems card hoarding is a viable strategy.

Ruby (red) nervously started claiming routes soon after Edwin and Xiaozhu started doing so, because the routes she needed were near where they were going too. During final scoring, we discovered that she had misread the map, and she failed to complete her long-distance ticket. Instead of scoring 20VP, she lost 20VP. That's a 40VP difference! Needless to say, she came in last. The two cities she mixed up were Pamplona and Palermo, one in Spain, the other in Italy.

One unique aspect of the Europe map is the train stations. I described these are life-savers. If a route you desperately need to claim is taken by someone else, you can place a station to borrow that route for the sake of completing tickets. The Europe map is slightly more forgiving because of this. In our game, some used all three stations, but some did not touch any. Unused stations are worth 4VP each.

Benz was blue, and his routes were all along the edges of the map. He focused on longer and higher valued routes.

The longest route bonus was won by Edwin (yellow). He had no breaks and no forks at all!

During final scoring, we passed our tickets to the players on our right to audit and add up.

The Reiner Knizia classic Ra was a game we agreed we must play this session. We had a lot of fun with it the last time we met up. My friends said they only got to know the real me after having played Ra with me. They said I sounded like a used car salesman when I analysed each play for them, how this set of tiles was good, how that set was great, why you should invoke Ra now, why you should keep drawing another tile. Well, I was just trying to help and I wanted to explain the intricacies so that they could play better. I was not trying to manipulate anyone into doing anything beneficial to me *cough* mostly.

The last time we played, everyone feared having no culture, because of the 5VP penalty. This time everyone paid much attention to collecting pharaohs. If you can grab the lead in the early game, and then maintain that lead, you will earn 15VP in total throughout the game. That is significant. We also wanted to avoid the 2VP penalty for having the fewest pharaohs. During our game, sometimes we tried to force others to have the fewest, and sometimes we simply manoeuvred the situation such that there were more opponents getting penalised together with us. It seems I tend to be the guy doing the latter. I guess I can't blame them for not trusting me.

This was a horrible set of tiles. Of the four tiles (lower row), three were disasters (black borders). You have more to lose than to gain. No one wanted to invoke Ra, until eventually the Ra track (upper row) filled up, and the epoch ended.

Unfortunately Ra is out of print now. I had thought it was still in print. I had also thought Priests of Ra would be almost the same game, just with some double sided tiles, but I later realised it has a different scoring system.

The Pandemic Gang

I lost this game, but I did manage to collect all eight monument types, which was nice. Ruby suggested that these custom player boards should have been printed in black and white, so that it is easier to see at one glance which tiles you have collected (which would be coloured), and which tiles you don't have yet (which would be black and white). Makes sense to me!