2004-03-10 RussCon Report

Game Results

Marty brought Pick Picknic, a simple game involving simultaneous decisions of which of 6 pastures you'll visit each turn to collect corn (as a bird) or to eat birds (as a fox). It seemed reasonably fun, though involved a lot of luck and chaos. Thanks to Jeffles for his stirring reading of the flavor text during his reading of the rules.

I see Zertz the 2-player pure strategy game got played twice more. I should give it a try; I read the rules a couple weeks ago and it looks interesting.

The highlight of the evening for me was the new game Domaine, which is a Klaus Teuber design clearly based on his earlier Löwenherz. It has the same core idea of placing walls to enclose regions (aka domaines) (which contain exactly one castle), but the region scoring is much more elegant and improved. The card deck also has the same idea of successive sets of cards (A, B, C, D), each set shuffled within itself, so that the card distribution has a definite progression, but the mechanism of card play is quite different: no more auctions; you pay to play a card; and instead of playing, you may sell a card to the chancery to get more money, where it may be picked up by a player later instead of taking a card from the deck. In our game, I soon pulled out into last place... but as the game approached the end, I managed to wall off a large domaine, earning a lot of points, but simultaneously walling off a large domaine for the leader JP, which enabled him to win, but secured second place for me - probably the best I could hope for, given my situation, so I was happy. Anyway, I will certainly play this one again.

I finally broke my streak in Ark of the Covenant! Our Most Assiduous Reader will recall that I came in last every time I played this game (3 times!) but this evening, I am proud to say, I progressed to next-to-last place, edging out Clayton. Okay, maybe this doesn't sound like great progress, but, hey, baby steps.

Jeffles brought Banana Republic, which looked vaguely familiar to me, and sure enough I played it once 4 years ago (and apparently we didn't like it much). It was played once more 2001-07-18.

It would seem the go board got used for gomoku and pente!