Allen and Yeeling have to leave, but then Ang and his cousin reached to join us in a game of 7 Wonders!
Another new release, this time from Asmodee Games.
This is Kareem’s copy, so thanks to him for bringing the game and teaching it to us.
Every player starts with a wonder of the world which produces a resource and have some VPs and/or special abilities when it is built.
There are multiple paths to get VPs to win: economic, military, technology, guilds, so on and so forth.
The game uses a drafting mechanic to cycle the deck through the player’s hands for them to build up their wonders and play area. Which I thought was pretty clever as the single pass through the entire deck controls the game pace to 30 minutes.
The limited interaction between the players and their immediate neighbors only is also an inspired design decision.
Overall I thought that 7 Wonders is a sort of Race for the Galaxy clone with its icons and build up, but streamlined to something simpler and direct.
We played 2 rounds of this game and I still like the balancing mechanic where certain buildings allow another building to build for free rather than using the normal resources. It sort of guides you down an optimised build order but with an option to diversify with a cost.
Our table played Lords of Vegas, a new game from Mayfair Games.
The players are myself, Kareem, Aanemesis, Allen and Yeeling.
What you pay for in this game - lots of dice!
In this game you play as a Vegas Casino Owner.
There are many ways to build up your casino.
There are 5 chains of casino with different payout potentials depending on the cards still left in the deck.
A casino can have only one boss, denoted by the owner of the dice with the highest value. However, there is an action to reorganise the casino by rerolling all the dices in the casino. And so there are many many MANY attempts to reorganise the casinos in order to become the boss.
Overall a fun game that has strategy and a healthy dose of luck.
Aanemesis (blue) won this game by a large margin.
Despite the luck factor, Aanemesis rode on his dice numerical superiority and crush all other pretenders to become the one and only Lord of Vegas! From the last photo, it can be seen that Aanemesis controlled 3 large casinos, myself 2, Allen and Kareem controlled one each.
Comments from the players:
Kareem “Vegas Baby!”
Heng “Vegas Bay-bie!”
Allen “Vegas Rollin’!”
Aanemesis “Dice is good!… er I mean no comment…”
Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!
I’ve done 19! 19%!
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (plus all the others!)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis (DUPLICATE)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
It was a game that Afif cannot forget. And maybe it’s the game that will hook him forever. Afif experienced the Hotsun(TM) maneuver at the hands of 18xx sharks Henry, Ainul and Heng.
(Heng: here’s your money Afif, don’t lose it to sharks…)
Usually Jeff is very good at this, taking pics of the tracks and the company ownership but since on the day itself he was called to invigilate another 18xx session (18TN - shall we see their report too?), we shall have to make do with some random pictures.
(Afif: ainul, heng says take care of your money, don’t lose it to sharks…
Ainul: but i’m a shark…)
The game started innocently enough with the prized B&O president cert falling into Ainul’s hands. Acting on my advice, Afif went for C&O while Henry tried his luck with NYH. As I got myself two expansive private companies, I went into investor mode and end up partnering with Ainul in B&O.
I advised Ainul into pushing B&O fast and hard early on to generate some handsome dividends through multiple trains and routes. This of course forced the others to catch up and soon the 2 trains were gone…
(Afif: oh crap, something’s not quite right here…)
Henry branched out to a 2nd company first to start NYC to get some synergy going between it and NYH. I myself started PRR with lots of cash as a result of a mutually beneficial arrangement with B&O. This mutually beneficial arrangement would continue with PRR and B&O scratching each others back and at critical juncture, blocked C&O as well as the NYC-NYH synergy from entering the lucrative south-eastern routes.
(Afif: this is my company, C&O…)
Later, I would start yet another company - Erie, while Ainul started up B&M. All this while, Afif starts getting antsy of the massive profits generated by other companies and decided to start another… no… to dump his own shares to buy shares of other companies!
The rest of us were looking at him like he was crazy but he kept saying that he still didn’t get the point. This was of course the cue for one of us to perform the Hotsun(TM) maneuver and Henry volunteered.
(Afif: and i’m dumping half my shares…
Ainul, Heng, Henry: what the heck?!?!)
Still clueless, Henry went through the motions of doing train shuffling and at the beginning of the next turn, dumped a trainless company to Afif. And that of course, was how Afif got hotsun-ed(TM) and left a half-bankrupt railroad mogul, doomed to shuffle his sole Diesel train between two empty shell of a company, watching his share price going into a death spiral.
But then we decided to call it a game rather than to go through all that. So, Afif, next time, be wary of holding more than one share of a rival’s company in your hands! Especially if he has two companies to do hanky panky stuff with!
(Afif: guys, i’m feeling the hotsun(TM), my shares’ on a spiral downwards…
Ainul, Heng, Henry: serves you right for dumping your shares!)
original post and comments here: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=137647009623835