Game(s) Played:
Hansa Teutonica
Agricola
Session – Hansa Teutonica
Player(s):
Divad (Blue)
Milo (Green)
Mo (Red)
Nitsuj (Purple)
On this particular game night we had a newcomer to our happy little gang (minus Da Panda) who was invited by Milo to join us. To welcome Divad to our circle, I brought out the most cutthroat game in my collection, Hansa Teutonica. That being said, it wasn’t a particularly cutthroat-y night for us as you will note in my recounting of the event below:
Divad dedicatedly plied himself to building the longest chain of offices, targeting the “Standal to Arnheim” achievement which he unfortunately could not complete due to a lack of merchant discs. Nevertheless it was a solid strategy since the rest of us were confined to our respective corners of the map giving him free reign of the centre notwithstanding his upgraded Town Key ability.
Milo concentrated mostly on owning “The Book” and the “Privilegium” cities as well as the surrounding cities giving her a lot of toll points and true enough, she also managed to end up having two merchant discs on the “Coellen Table” which effectively gave her the win.
Mo was actually the only busy-body of the game, blocking others although he was rarely kicked (most of us preferred to move our pieces away from the route) and that perhaps cost him the game. He did manage to squeeze one merchant disc onto the “Coellen Table” but it wasn’t enough even as he tried to consolidate his position on the “Privilegium” and “Money Bags” cities to try and earn toll points from other Players, it was far too late.
I sacrificed my merchant disc early to really consolidate my position on the “Actions” city but was not very richly rewarded with toll points since most of them preferred other abilities over “Actions” and I ended up having to earn the toll points myself. With all my extra actions I managed to upgrade my “Prvilegium” and “Money Bags” and snag the top spot of the “Coellen Table”. Alas, to gain more merchant discs would have put Milo too far ahead in scoring and thus I could only watch as Milo and Mo snapped up the remaining spots on the table.
Sadly my trusty camera was lost somewhere in the wilderness of my house. This winning shot was taken by Milo’s BB
Time Taken: 75 minutes
Results Of Game
Winna – Milo (50 Points)
2nd – Nitsuj (48 Points)
3rd – Divad (30+ Points?)
4th – Mo (30+ Points?)
Memorable In-Game Comments:
Nitsuj: "Look, Divad’s going to win if this carries on."
Mo: "Are you going to stop him?"
Nitsuj: “Nope."
The power of psychology.
Further Thoughts:
I enjoy playing the 4 & 5 Player side of the map with 4 Players as it feels less screwy, but then again part of the reason one plays Hansa Teutonica is so that you can let your mean-bastard-ness hang loose and frustrate everyone else to no end. I still haven’t played against anyone who has outright abused the bonus tokens of the game, but going down that strategy really depends on the usefulness of the tokens that are randomly selected. I still enjoy Hansa Teutonica and would never turn down a game.
Rating: 7.5/10
Session – Agricola
Player(s):
Divad ()
Milo (Purple)
Mo ()
Nitsuj ()
Agricola has been getting a lot of game time at our table lately, I think this is mostly due to the guys being more laid back about game selection and Agricola being a chick magnet.
I find Agricola actually hard to teach to newcomers primarily because there are no basic moves in Agricola, everything from start to finish is about preparing you for the next set of actions in the round and being in place to take advantage of these actions. I normally hate to go the way of explaining the actions as they come up, especially in Agricola, but sometimes you just need to minimize the rules downtime and get quickly into the game. The result of this was reflected particularly in Divad’s farm at game’s end which was full of unused spaces, so I must apologize to you Divad, it was completely my fault.
As usual, tensions were high from the second round onwards in everybody’s rush to feed their families. Nobody received any Begging Cards this game but it was at the cost of some of the lowest scores we’ve seen in our games so far. Milo and I were into “Plowing and Sowing” from the early game with Mo catching on a little later. I faltered a fair bit by trying to build pastures to capitalize on animals when no wood was available and Mo went slightly overboard with the occupations and minor improvements. Not surprisingly, Mo seemed to have a good combination of occupations & minor improvements whilst the rest of us only used them sparingly.
I think none of us were fully prepared to take advantage of the “Family Growth” action, not having enough resources to commission the additional rooms required in our homes. In the end, Milo’s variety of animals and sufficient fruit off the land gave her the victory to make her night of bad-assery ownage complete.
Milo only took one pic of her winning farm
Time Taken: 120 minutes
Results Of Game
Winna – Milo (33 Points)
2nd – Nitsuj (29 Points)
3rd – Mo (19 Points)
4th – Divad (11 Points)
Memorable In-Game Comments:
Milo: "They need to eat AGAIN?"
Further Thoughts:
I’m glad I changed my mind about Agricola. I realize that deciding not to own a game just because it has a "superior" brother/sister game (read: Le Havre ) is not the same as owning two similar games.
Rating: 8/10
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