2 Player Alhambra.....with expansions

Yesterday Tina and I played a game of Alhambra and we thought we would use the latest expansion that we had bought and hadn't tried yet. Expansion 3 has 4 modules as usual, the Thief cards, the 1pt coins in a bag, the trader meeples and the extra wall cards. We used just the thief cards the coins in the bag and the wall cards. Another player joined us for this game....Dirk....he always turns up for 2 player matches. I explained the rules for the additional modules and play started. When you don't pay exactly the right money for a tile you usually get nothing, but with the 1pt coins in the bag for every 2 you pay over the price of the tile you get to take 1 coin from the bag. This helps you to pay the correct money for tiles and get extra turns, very useful.

Alhambra with Expansion 3
Dirk always seems to get good tiles in our games and this was no exception, he led in purple for the first 2 scorings. In the rules for the thief cards it says that you cannot use them before your own turn....well, in 2 player that is a bit difficult, so we just played it that you could. But really we didn't find that we used them much and both had cards left at the end of the game. The extra wall cards we did use, although not until near the end just before the final scoring. Tina had led for all the game I think and with a couple of tiles left in the game she could see that she would win and played a tile card to complete her wall. Her Alhambra was now completely surrounded! For the last couple of turns she denied me tiles that I needed, so I managed to play tile card to complete my wall also, we now had both surrounded our Alhambras.

Tina celebrates victory
We didn't use the traders this time, you get a trader stall with 3 meeples on it which you place anywhere round your Alhambra, if you build a tile of the same colour as one of the meeples on the trader tile you can place it on the just built tile. You can then put another meeple on the trader tile to bring the number back up to three and place it somewhere else round your Alhambra. You then score points depending how many colours of meeples you have in your Alhambra at the end.
All in all I think this is a good expansion, we will try the traders next time. We don't use to many modules, 3 is max, I think it over complicates the game. I also really like the city gates from expansion 2.

Final Score
Tina 150, Colin 112, Dirk 104