Game Night: Maiden Voyage

Saturday Night was the first of what I hope will be many game events hosted at my place. I've got 8 or 9 people on my invite list, with the expectation that I won't get more than 4 or 5 people on any given day. The first gathering was semi-successful. The first gamer showed up around 5 or so, and it was just he and I for an hour or so. Luke is relatively new to these crazy board games, so I imagine tonight was a lot to take in. We started off with a head to head game of Carcassonne: The Discovery. It was his first time playing Carcassonne in any form, and he picked it up very well, as my victory was pretty narrow. This probably took about 30 to 45 minutes, we then moved on to Rummikub for a bit.

Settling the island of Catan.

Matt showed up near the end of our Rummikub game, and he wanted to try Settlers of Catan so we set up the board, placed our starting settlements and got started. Jimbob showed up shortly after we got started, so we let him place 2 settlements, gave him a couple of bonus resources and he jumped in. Matt was the only one new to Catan at the table, and everyone enjoyed it though it was probably the longest game of Catan I've ever been a part of. The laws of probability failed us, as stone, which paid out on 8, 10 and 12, was incredibly scarce. 8 and 10 only rolled a couple of times each, while the dice continuously rolled 3s and 4s. Matt latched onto Longest Road early on and never let go. I eventually ended things when I got to a wood port and was able to trade up for stone and upgrade to cities. It's looking like I may need to pick up the 5-6 player add-on for Settlers of Catan in the near future.

Settlers took almost 2 hours, a hell of a long time for this game. We then busted out Gangster, a new favorite of Jimbob and myself, which the others wanted to try. This game went over very well, and everyone understood the scoring rules it got pretty competitive. I took advantage of a war between Matt and Jimbob and snagged several smaller territiories while the others fought over a few high point-value ones. The last round saw everyone conspiring to dump my men in the river while I scrambled about trying to end the game as quickly as possible.

Gangster: damn, it feels good.

All said, everything went pretty well, and the only real problem was that we didn't really get started until about 630 or so. That and the table in the gaming room is too damn small. Game Night: Part Deux is tentatively planned for Saturday Sept 20th.