Tuesday January 4th - Mogul, Typo

No Richard or Garry tonight, Richard is hurling himself of a mountain somewhere and Garry is having to work. Anyway 2 card games tonight, Mogul and Typo. First up:



Mogul

Brief description from BGG.

Mogul is one of three Spiel aus Timbuktu games with a common train theme, along with Crazy Race and Station Manager. The boxes even fit together to make a common picture.



There are six shares each of five railroad companies. Each turn, one of the share cards is revealed and an aution ensues. Players earn money by dropping out of the auction, but the last player in wins the right to take the card or sell shares he already owns. Points are kept on a scoring track.



Never played this one and I quite liked it. Knowing when to stay in an auction and when to quit and take the chips is definitely a necessary skill. Also keeping track of how many cards in each share have already been sold is very useful. A crash card is shuffled into four cards and these are placed at the bottom of the deck so you never quite know when the game will finish. At game end all shares on the table are worthless and every 5 chips are worth a victory point.



Final Scores

Steve 9, Colin 19, Natalie 17, Neil 18



Typo

A word game on the lines of 6 Nimmt, from BGG.



Players are dealt 12 cards from an alphabetic deck and play them to the table in rows and columns to make words, or the start of words. Players choose their cards simultaneously. When the cards are shown, the lowest in the alphabet goes first and so on. Players add their card to the rows or columns on the table, calling the word or part-word they are forming, so adding E to the start of LAST gives ELAST, for which you can call "elastic".



All cards must be placed, so if you cannot form a valid word to call, you pick up the longest line of cards, which will score against you. In the following rounds, play order is Z-A.



Obviously you don’t want to pick up cards as they count against you, I seem to have missed this vital bit of information and amassed an outstanding total of cards to come last by a long margin. We also had a copy of the Scrabble Dictionary handy to resolve disputes. I really liked this game despite coming a long way back, a few interesting (and legal) words surfaced too.



Final Scores

Natalie -8, Colin -41, Neil -25, Steve -10



Apologies for no pictures again this week, I didn’t forget the camera deliberately but not recording my abysmal performance at Typo is an additional bonus :)