19.06.2003 / Jori

Carcassonne:

Princes of Florence:

Settlers Of Catan (with C&K and SF):

One of the greatest Settler sessions ever! We haven't played settlers lately and at this point it looked like that we have six players, so we decided to play settlers with Seafarers expansion (We always play Settlers with Cities & Knight's expansion). After some confusion, we notice that we have five players left, because Heikki have to leave with some lame excuse...

After the placement of initial settlements, the game advanced very evenly. 6 was dominating number, and because everybody received 1 resource and 1 commodity when 6 was rolled (from three different tiles), nobody was in clear lead.

In the first half of the game Juha and Petri were in a small lead. Juha from gaining a little more cards than others and Petri for his good strategic expansion to different island (extra victory points).

Then in the middle of the game Jussi and Timo build metropolises (blue and green) and Juha controls the longest road. At this point Juha and Jussi were leading (10-11 points or something). Within few rounds I stole green metropolis from Timo, but reciprocally he closed my ship route to my third island (I missed three easy points). At this point everybody was around 10 points. Peculiar point was, that seven was rolled only couple of times, and player's hands were always full of cards.

The endgame was very tight. Timo stole longest road from Juha round before and made his last 13:th point with merchant. Jussi and myself would probably have won in that same round.

Timo 13 (10 One extra point to winner)
Juha 12 (9)
Jussi 12 (9)
Jori 12 (9)
Petri 11 (9)

Java:

This was the first time we played this game. Only Juha had read the rules. So this was kind of learning game. First few rounds we played the game incorrectly. But as we read rules further, we always notice some mistakes and at the end, we probably played it right. English translation was very lousy done. It was sometimes very difficult to understand, what the translator meant (maybe midnight and cider/beer has some part of it..).

Slowly we also understand the game's tactical aspects. We also notice, that final scoring is quite brutal. You definitely have to save some village tiles to final scoring round or you are in trouble. Also being fourth player in final scoring rounds really sucks. I am wondering that if the game works better, if you skip the final scoring completely.

The game feels quite good and it has definitely high tactical aspect, but is it a great game....probably not.