Domaine, Puerto Rico, Merchants of Amsterdam

Small Games Club turnout tonight, due to some convention. What’d I play?

Domaine again, which I won, again. This was a way cool victory, a real coup. See, we had all been placing our castles towards the edges of the board, taking advantage of the mines. I placed one in the middle, figuring I might get a cheap domaine by default and then expand it to seize the capitol. What actually happened was that everyone was managing their domaines so tightly that at some point I realized I could play a couple of border cards (which I had), close off two tiny domaines, and grab half the board in the one created in the leftover space. And that’s what I did, grabbing something like 37 points at once.

Then, of course, Puerto Rico, just five players with the standard pieces, since we had two people who’d never played it before. bugsybanana won it with 62 points, after we’d managed to run out of colonists, victory chips, plantations, and had only two buildings left unbought.

Then something new: Merchants of Amsterdam, with its timer-based auction mechanic. Most of us were bidding much too high for stuff. The guy who won no bids wound up taking second, with the guy who won only a few bids taking first, and the rest of us madcap big spenders way in back. Still pretty good; I wouldn’t mind trying it again.

At the end, Ratched wins on points

I was just reminded of a dream I’d had a few days back. In the dream, Rocky and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had come out in the same year, and Rocky had won the Best Picture Oscar. (In real life, Cuckoo’s Nest won Best Picture for 1975, and Rocky won it for ’76.)

So in the dream I was talking about what might have happened if Cuckoo’s Nest had won, speculating about a line of sequels, each worse than the one before. In Cuckoo’s Nest III Mr T shows up in the hospital, in Cuckoo’s Nest IV McMurphy winds up in a Soviet psychiatric ward, etc.