Domaine, Puerto Rico, Merchants of Amsterdam

[avram]

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.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

What you experienced is exactly what I was describing in my last comment about Domaine--a huge domain being built by default giving one player a gazillion points and ending the game immediately. Every other player has to be guarding against that or it very like happen.

Re:

[avram]

That depends on initial placement. First time I played, three players placed towards the middle of the board. This time, I was the only one.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

The last time I played, the big default domaine formed at one edge, and was something like 20 spaces. All that is required for a big domain to form is for the other domains to be relatively small.