Today we played Lords Of Xidit with Isaac's High School buddy, Chris Suttliff. Beth also enjoys this game, so we were able to get her to play it with us. I've played Lords Of Xidit with Isaac and Beth a few times, but it was always a 3-player game. It seemed fitting to play the short version, only 9 "years", since this was Chris' first time.
Beth commented on how this game was so much better with 4 players since we didn't have the dummy player that we had to deal with in the 3-player game. I agreed, it was more fun.
Before the first census of the game, Isaac got a good lead on building up his towers. Mid-game, everyone else had gotten far ahead of me on the on the towers. I was doing well with the bards tokens, but since towers were the first assessment for the end game, I was concerned that I'd be eliminated right away for that, so I needed to shift my focus. After the second census, I was working to catch up on towers to the point where I managed to tie with Isaac for the number of towers (winning the tie breaker), but Isaac and Beth still had more gold and points for bards tokens.
In the end, we found that there were way more tokens in the castle in the middle of the board than we had seen in any of our games. I had 4 tokens in there, Chris had 5, and Isaac had 6. Beth didn't have any in there, but her focus on the outside picked up way more points for the bards tokens, which gave her the victory. It was her first victory in all the times playing this game, so she was quite happy with herself.