For the second week running it’s just Tony, Fee and me. Last week we were able to play Princes of Florence. It’s not at it’s best with three, but seeing as I hadn’t played it for over a year I wasn’t going to say no!
Tony won Princes by a couple of points: he bought mostly Jesters and Recruitments at auction, and bought several extra profession cards. I bought mostly Builders and Prestige cards. In the end Tony’s late game large works gave him a 2 point victory over me. My 19 points of prestige cards (least empty spaces, most buildings, two large buildings) weren’t quite enough.
I wasted a couple of early actions I think, so much so that I only actually completed two works. Early on I should have just concentrated on scoring the works I had, rather than buying stuff to try and make them better. I had forgotten how hard it is to hit the late game work requirements when you don’t have any jesters.
Fee was competing with Tony for the Jesters and Recruitments, but unlike Tony she was playing her works early (indeed after the fourth turn she had no profession cards in hand). This wins her a few early best work bonuses, but generally you don’t get as many points playing that way. At least by competing with Tony she was making their money management tricky, thus boosting my chances.
As neither of them had much interest in competing with me for Builders or Prestige cards my money management was relatively simple. I think both my works were for points (maybe with an odd hundred florins), and I still had a little left at the end.
Princes of Florence is a great game. I must try to play it more this year.
This week both Tony and I have brought Tigris and Euphrates, another classic game that we don’t play anywhere near enough.
Still Tony doesn’t want to jump straight into such a hard game (probably a wise move) so we start with a quick hand of San Juan. Tony and I are pretty strongly violet (he is convinced it is the best plan), whilst Fiona is building many production buildings. She gets a Guild Hall and a Palace, but it’s not enough to beat my City Hall plus Palace.
The main difference being that I had a Quarry whilst she didn’t have a Smithy, and I was able to get down a couple of one cost violets for ‘free’ (I know they’re not literally free unless you have Carpenter as well). The Guild Hall players should really be looking to close the game out with 12 builds, but Fiona’s income wasn’t as good ( a function of being the only player heavily invested in production), so she only finished with 10 builds.
After this game Tony starts explaining how the violet plan is so much better than Guild Halls, and that the game is therefore slightly broken. I try to convince him otherwise, but despite the fact that I have played the game about ten times more than him, he apparently knows more than I do. That’s annoys me.
After San Juan we unpack T&E, and Tony reminds Fee of the rules whilst I take a loo break. He does his usual effective job. I get back just in time to repeat some of his gibberish regarding the scoring of external conflicts into actual English.
The game gets underway with me giving Fee a few basic strategy tips (Green and Black leaders are the most obvious to play early, remember to support your leaders with Temples etc). I have a glut of opening Green tiles so I start my own kingdom in the bottom right of the board. The plan was to make a monument, but it turned out to not be necessary.
I also have my Black leader in this kingdom, and join with the lower central treasure. At this point this kingdom is quite close to an external confict with Fee’s central kingdom, and I still have a glut of Green and Black tiles in hand. So I deliberately keep my kingdom a little weaker than hers, until she attacks, and I have enough for the tie in black to win that conflict. That ends the external conflict and breaks up her kingdom, so that soon my Green leader boots hers off as well.
That basically gives me enough Green and Black points for the game. I pick up some Blue and Red points throughout the game, and as my Green leader never gets displaced I get 5 of the 8 treasures collected for quite a confortable win (my score is 8/9/9/12)
Fee got most her leaders booted off midway throughout the game, but just re-entered her black leader in the empty bottom left corner and spent several turns getting a couple of cubes per turn in the colours she was weakest. And she also picked up a treasure relatively simply in the top right hand corner to end the game (I wanted the game to end, so I was helping).
Tony has a couple of strong colours, but is very weak in black and another colour (green?) and finishes last. He complains that he got dreadful draws (which might be true, he did change a load of tiles a couple of times), but I think he overstates his bad luck. In particular I think he got loads of reds but didn’t make the best use of them. He may have forgotten that you can remove leaders from the board (at one stage he had a four temple leader in red – I think he could have removed it, tried to kick off my green or black leader with an internal conflict then completed a B/G temple).
After T&E there’s time for one more quick game, something a bit longer than filler, but not too long. Whilst some groups can play Puerto Rico in 45 minutes we’re not one of them, so it’s San Juan again.
I want to try and win with a Guild Hall strategy this time, but after building an early Prefecture my counselling attempts aren’t helpful (though I do build Silver), and quickly Tony, and then Fiona have Prefectures as well.
This game is a little odd. Everybody builds a mixture of violet and production and eventually Tony and Fiona find the Guild Halls. But because they aren’t huge Halls the scores aren’t that high, and I’m keeping pace just with a couple of Monuments (I also have Library & Silver). I close with a Triumphal Arch, but lose by one card on the tiebreaker to Tony.
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