Two Player Alhambra

Thumbs up to Queen Games and Ludo Fact, they didn't only send me my missing cards but a complete sealed deck!! Very handy, because now I can keep one deck for two player games and one for more players. Anyway, Tina and I played 3 games of Alhambra yesterday and as we were only two players we employed the excellent services of Dirk the phantom 3rd player.

Alhambra layout - Jubilee Edition
Tina had never played Alhambra before and I played quite a few years ago, but she picked up the rules very quickly and soon managed to complain about me not shuffling the money cards as they were coming up c**p! Still, she didn't do too badly in the first game, I managed to get the win. After thoroughly shuffling the money cards, I didn't want anymore complaints :) we started our second game, I know you are dependent on what tiles appear to buy, but how you position them is also very important, Tina was getting better at positioning her tiles in this game, especially regarding the walls for more points. She played really well in only her second game and won. I was even beaten by Dirk!!

In our third game, it was very close, right down to the last tile. When the tiles were handed out to the player with most money at the end of game, Tina got a purple tile which I thought gave her a share of first place. I had 4 and with her tile she had 4 as well, but looking again at her Alhambra I noticed she had five!! That gave her a close win by two points......at least I beat Dirk to second place.

Tina victorious after the 3rd game!

Happy Gaming!!

A Day in Salzburg

Last Wednesday (15th) we had a day in Salzburg, my wife's sister was on holiday so she came with us. It was a lovely sunny day and the bus ride took about 90mins. Well, I can't go to Salzburg without having just a peep in the game shops there. The first, by the Mirabell Platz is really good, it has two doors, one for adults and a small one for kinder, my wife insists in going in by the kinder door!! Anyway, I saw the Jubilee Edition of Alhambra there and I had been meaning to get get this for some time, grabbed it. Walking back towards the old city you have to cross the river Salz and just over the bridge is another fairly good game shop. Browsing around in there I saw the Settlers of Catan Geographies: Germany. I had read good reports of this and seen Tom Vasel's video review (although the camera work gave me a headache), so I purchased this one as well. Our day was great, nice lunch, my wife and her sister did some serious shopping, finished off by coffee at one of the many cafes, ours was just by Mozart's birth house.

The board and game pieces are superb
I must say that the production values of the 'Germany' edition are extremely high. If you like Settlers this is a great edition to add to your collection. I haven't actually played it yet but it sounds great. The monuments and cathedral pieces clip into a special moulded box insert which keeps them securely.

Close up of the high quality playing pieces

I wasn't so lucky when I opened Alhambra, the Jubilee edition has some special playing pieces which is nice, but I was short one scoring card and 9 money cards. Doh!! Very frustrating when that happens, it hasn't happened to me before though so I guess I've been lucky. Anyway, a quick email to Queen Games on the Thursday elicited a reply yesterday with an apology for the inconvenience caused and a promise to mail the missing cards which I thought was pretty quick. I played Alhambra many years ago with my game group in the UK and I thought it would be ideal for the players I play with now in Austria.

A couple of game sessions

I know this is a bit late but we had my wife's sister staying with us for a couple of weeks so this is the first time I have had to write this up. Pauline and Stephen were also over here so we had a couple of game sessions. In the first one we played Zooloretto, my wife is not keen on this, but we have only played as a two player so I was hoping it would work better with five. Janet (wife's sister) is not really a gamer, we've played Army of Frogs a couple of times and that was it. Anyway, everyone picked up the rules fairly easily and they seemed to like it. I couldn't get going really and played terrible.

Janet and Pauline study the tiles
We played two games and had a good time. I didn't fair well in either game coming last in the second.

Final Scores
Game one - Pauline 23, Stephen 21, Colin 16, Janet 15, Tina 13

Game two - Tina 23, Pauline 22, Stephen 20, Janet 19, Colin 11

A few days later we adjourned to Stephen and Pauline's flat and played basic TtR. Again we played a couple of games, Janet was the only one who hadn't played before. In the first game the bonus card was for longest train route, but in the second we changed it for most routes completed, it's surprising how different you play when it's most routes.

Ticket to Ride
Tina and Janet played together on this one and couldn't seem to get the routes they needed so ended up getting a pretty big minus score on the second game.

Final Scores
Game one - Stephen 136 (didn't record the other scores)
Game two - Pauline 141, Stephen 107, Colin 91 Janet/Tina 36

Settlers.....online!!

Well, there hasn't been much happening on the gaming front over the last few weeks. Except I have been playing a lot of Settlers online. I may have mentioned before that I play, but I have just been looking at my stats and I didn't realise quite how much. Anyway I thought I would write a bit about the site and tell you of my experience of it.

http://games.asobrain.com/index

Sign up is free and they have a few games other than Settlers, by the way Settlers is called Xplorers here. Toulouse, which a Carcassonne clone, and two other games, Match and Roadblock. I haven't played any of these so I don't know what they are like.

You can play basic Settlers or Cities and Knights, ranked or unranked. If you play ranked your games get recorded and you get...well a ranking! You can opt to play against real players or bots to get a feel for the interface. I play basic almost all the time. One of the good things is that there are multiple maps to play on, not only the default island but many others created by the players themselves. My favourites at the moment are Fifth Element, Discovery and River Runs Through It.

Start of a basic game of Explorers - Discovery Map
As you can see from the pic, there are some white hexes, you don't know what resource these will produce until you build a road to them. Also the multicoloured hexes produce any resource, you choose when the number is rolled. This is the start of the game, the players have just placed there starting settlements. I am white (Coljen), I wanted to go on the multi at the bottom left but the other players tied that up!

Middle phase, I am up to 9 points - Discovery Map
You can play games to 10, 13 or 15 points, this is a 13 point game and is well developed now. I have got 2 cities on the multi and got a wood port as well. The other two players kept dropping the robber on the multi though.

Final score, I am victorious! - Discovery Map
As you can see there are still some undiscovered hexes and another multi was discovered middle left.

Here are a few stats of my play:
Dec - Played 20 Won 3 2nd 6 3rd 11
Jan - Played 3 Won 0 2nd 3 3rd 0
Feb - Played 66 Won 21 2nd 24 3rd 21
Mar - Played 63 Won 22 2nd 24 3rd 18

Maps
Fifth Element Games 51 Won 15 Lost 35
River Runs Games 35 Won 7 Lost 28
Forest Escape Games 29 Won 8 Lost 21
Discovery Games 21 Won 9 Lost 12
Christmas Games 14 Won 4 Lost 10
March of the Penguins Games 1 Won 1 Lost 0
Default Expansion Games 1 Won 1 Lost 0
Golden Circle Games 1 Won 1 Lost 0
Dutch Empire Games 1 Won 0 Lost 1
Default Island Games 1 Won 0 Lost 1

I didn't realise that I played that much!!! Anyway it's good fun and most of the players are friendly. I have met one or two that have a real problem if you drop the robber on them.....so I do it even more :) Give it a try you might like it.

Happy Gaming!!!

It's Finally Stopped Snowing

The Lions Head
It has been snowing for 16 days or so here, and today it finally stopped. I don't think for good as the sky looks full of it. Anyway here are some snowy pictures for you all.

Walking Round the Lake
Sunshine in Winter
The Schafberg Railway!
In the first picture you can see the very distinctive outline of the Sparber, or Lions Head mountain, it features a lot in my pictures because it dominates the lake and is so picturesque. In the next we have been on one of our walks, the road follows a route above the lake, then turns and comes back along the lakeside. A lovely walk and only takes about an hour. This walk offers wonderful views of the lake and mountains and if you take the camera you are guaranteed some beautiful pictures.
The next picture was taken on the same walk. On the opposite side of the lake to the Sparber, ie the side we live on, the Schafberg mountain rises to 1,783 metres and in the last picture you can see, or rather you can't, the cog railway track that winds its way up the mountain. It only runs in the summer months because as you can see the track is deep under the snow.

On the gaming front there hasn't been much happening, I have played some Settlers online and that's it really. Been to busy walking and taking pictures!!

Happy Gaming!!!

Second Games Session in 2 days .....

Today Pauline and Stephen found there way through the snow blizzard to come and play some more games....with the occasional glass of wine! Talking of snow it hasn't stopped today, snowing constantly and very heavy at times. The snow plough is in constant use, driving past our house at regular intervals.

I thought Settlers would be a good choice for this evening, a classic euro and a decent gateway game. After explaining the rules and dishing out a crib sheet for the improvement cards (my copy is in German), off we went. Of course placing your initial towns is crucial to get off to a good start and Stephen (blue) thought he could have done better when he realised that he had no source for bricks. Everyone else seemed OK and the game developed smoothly. After we had played for a bit Stephen's initial disappoint diminished somewhat and he had a nice little development going. Unfortunately Tina (Red) got really blocked in with little room to build. I thought that I (White) wasn't in a very good position but it turned out not too bad. Pauline (Orange) managed to build a nice road right round the edge of the board and claim the longest road tile.


I was also running out places to build and as I had placed my four cities started to buy improvement cards to try and get some VPs that way. I did get caught with the robber rather badly having 17 cards in hand! What made it worse is that I actually rolled the 7. I did get the VP cards that I wanted and having 9 points on the board I played the 3 VP cards I had to claim the victory (we played to 12 points).
I think everyone enjoyed the game, Stephen said he didn't enjoy it quite as much as TtR, but I think next time everyone will get a better start as they have more knowledge of what's going on.

Final Score
Colin 12, Pauline 9, Stephen 9, Tina 4

Next up was Carcassonne, Pauline and Stephen have the Mayflower edition which they haven't played so I thought we could play the vanilla version first so they could get a feel for the gameplay. After a short rules explanation we jumped in. I couldn't seem to get going at all in this game, just didn't seem to get the tiles (that's my excuse anyway!!) The others were all scoring decent points and getting right away from me. I didn't actually score anything until about halfway through.


I think this was another game everyone liked, again another classic gateway game.

Final Score
Stephen 77, Pauline 66, Colin 59, Tina 45

Here is a picture from our balcony so you can see the snow.


That was taken over a week ago, it's much thicker now!!

Happy Gaming!!

First Games Session for a while

Ticket to Ride - Marklin
We have had plenty of snow here in St. Wolfgang, almost a foot this past week. And quite cold as well, -4C or thereabouts. We have been settling back into a routine after being in England so much over the last 3 months and looking forward to our next gaming session. Pauline and Stephen are over for a week during half term so we hope to get a couple of sessions in. Our first was yesterday, Pauline and Stephen had a copy of TtR Marklin which they had played a few times over the Christmas period so that was first on the table. I have played it once a few years ago and Tina had not played at all. It's most involved of the the TtR series involving passengers and another train card for 4+ routes. The bonus card is not for longest continuous track but for most completed route cards. Stephen started off early collecting passenger cards and not laying too much track. I concentrated on completed the routes I had initially drawn and then getting more route cards, taking 1 long and 3 short most times.
In the end I had 11 completed route cards for 83 points plus the bonus and surprisingly came out the winner.

Final Score
Colin 182, Pauline 167, Stephen 144, Tina 130

Enjoying TtR Marklin
The next game we played was Metro. This Dirk Henn game by Queen Games was published in 1997. Basically each player is trying to construct rail routes and trying to make them as long as possible while restricting their opponents as short as possible. Each tile in the route is worth 1 point, tiles can be counted more than once if the route doubles back upon itself. Again I had played this several years ago but everyone else had not played. We played the first game, and it was a bit of a learning curve.

The board for Metro
We decided to play a second game as everybody had a bit more idea what to do. I don't think we liked this game too much, you have to restrict your opponents routes to low scores as much as trying to score as much as possible yourself....ie stuffage. It's a nice little game but probably not our first choice for table time.

Final Scores
Game 1 - Colin 62, Pauline 54, Stephen 52, Tina 45
Game 2 - Stephen 57, Colin 50, Tina 48, Pauline 43

We are having another session tomorrow, report to follow.

Happy Gaming!!