New game meetup

On Thursday evening, I took the 15-20 minute drive to Congleton to try out a new game group: the Congleton & District Light Board Games Club (bit of a mouthful but reasonably good description). This is a new group that have only had a couple of meetings in their current location (previously having been based in Leek). Tonight there were four of us, although they do have a few more attendees and are looking to build up numbers.

I took along a few games and we started with Liar’s Dice / Bluff as an easy to explain aperitif. None of the others had played before so, obviously, I suffered from the teacher’s curse and was first to go out (although if I was making excuses, I might suggest I was pushing the bidding up so I could demonstrate the set aside dice/increase bid/reroll mechanism). Anyway, that gave me chance to heckle the others and Barry was next to lose his final die, through no fault of his own as Manny challenged an exact bid by Peter. This led to a sudden death face-off between the final two and Peter was able to outmanoeuvre Manny to take the win.

Peter then suggested Stone Age and I was happy with that as it is always good fun, although I was amazed to find I’d not played it for over five years. Peter and Barry both knew the game but it was new to Manny. This game took the rest of the evening, which surprised me a bit, but we were playing a relaxed game. That’s not to say people were going easy on each other and I was a bit shocked when Peter played seven meeples on the forest at one point just to stop me finishing the game. Barry was collecting cards like crazy and it was obvious he was picking up stacks of end game points. Manny was concentrating on huts, although he did also spend quite a bit of time in the love hut, increasing his family to dynastic proportions. I was also grabbing huts but picking off cards that worked well with huts and my harvest production. Eventually the game ended and, sure enough, Barry got about 90 end-game points and looked to be uncatchable. Well, yes he was actually, but I had squirrelled away lots of bonuses myself and ended up just two points behind him, and one more pip on my final dice roll would have given me enough in-game points to take the win. Curses but a very close and hard fought game.
Final scores: Barry 184, Garry 182, Manny 150, Peter 137.

Thanks to the guys for making me feel welcome – even though they didn’t let me win and I’m hoping this will be a regular Thursday session.