Last night was the first of our scheduled Wednesday night gaming events. We've decided to have an almost bi-weekly event on the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of the month and the events will probably alternate between Clearwater and Port Richey.
The Unnamable Chris and I arrived at Wyldwing's house around 6:15. "Big Mac" (as introduced by Charles to his wife) was already there playing
Pirateer. TylerChuit arrived soon after with
Galaxy Trucker and The Internet (The IT Crowd special edition) in his hands. Wyldwing was anxious to get into Galaxy Trucker and managed to quickly end the game with Mac. I'm not certain who the winner of that game was.
Since
Galaxy Trucker is only for 4 players (unless you have the expansion), TylerChuit decided to run the game like a GM so that the 4 of us could play. This also put us all on even ground since no other player had any prior experience with the game. TylerChuit told us that we were just going to play a test round, but we continued beyond the first round so it pretty much turned into a test game.
In the first round all of us made plenty of mistakes with building and incorrectly flipping tiles and most of us seemed to get a small amount of cash from the trip.
We moved into the second round where I built the largest ship of the group. I messed up by building an alien pod next to the center cabin of my ship, but I was allowed to put my alien inside since we hadn't been told about that rule ahead of time. Although I had some very weak points in my ship, I had the largest crew, plenty of storage, and a reasonable amount of weapons and shields. I managed to keep my ship intact that round and the crew alone seemed to give me plenty of options during that round of the game, so I picked up a massive chunk of cash that round.
The third round we chose to use the standard space ship with a 3-1 vote. I tried to reinforce the structure of my ship better that time, but had unfortunately left myself very weak on one side and had no lasers or shields to block attacks from the side or rear. After seeing the desirable affects of having a large crew, The Unnamable Chris built several cabins, but still managed to have one less crew member than I did. Wyldwing and Mac appeared to build more heavily with lasers and shields. Unfortunately, Mac was the first to lose nearly half his ship with a single hit from the rear and soon after that my ship started to get ripped apart. Wyldwing's ship was fast and held together well. He also had a reasonable amount of storage space. He used his massive lead to control what was available to everyone else, even though he was constantly discarding cargo to replace it with more valuable crates.
In the end, even though I thought round 2 had secured my lead, Wyldwing won the game.
After that we moved on to
Condottierre. Wyldwing had recently played an older version of the game in California, so we discussed some differences before we started the game. We agreed to use the Draw After Combat variant, which gives the players 7 cards to start, rather than 10, but allows everyone to draw 3 cards after each battle, rather than waiting for Rounds to end.
The battles were intense, and although Charles had some recent experience with the game, he failed to claim even one territory. Mac took some good positions near the beginning of the game, but never managed to get them connected. I had nearly claimed the 5 territories that I needed to win, but was just a little short in the end. TylerChuit did his best to block anyone from a clear win, but in the end we all failed to stop The Unnamable One.
The night ended late, but we all had a good time (at least as far as I could tell), and are looking forward to our next event in two weeks.
