2014 Lounge Day Games Played

I don't think I played very many games on Lounge Day, but I definitely spent a lot of time playing games. I got in games of 10 Days in Asia, Eminent Domain, Titan, and Innovation.

The Titan game was a 6 player affair featuring a lot of very rusty Titan players. I believe the game itself lasted 6.5 hours and I ended up coming 2nd. In a game of Titan 2nd place really is the first loser since you were in the game the whole time and didn't get to win. At least Adam got to go play other games after he went out first in less than 2 hours! On the plus side I got to attack with a serpent so that really makes it all ok in the end. Overall I hit the top of every tech tree with recruits of 1 colossus, 2 serpents, 3 hydras, and some unicorns and rangers for flavour. Robb went the other path and recruited entirely points from the other players in the game and ended up with a size 18 Titan. That's ludicrous! And to think, Adam had a decent chance to kill off Robb's Titan in the first couple hours of the game. Oh well! Still fun!

Eminent Domain is a game I've played twice now, and each time I walked away really wanting to play again. I fear it's actually pretty degenerate since there doesn't seem to be a lot of variance between games but for now I really want to try out the different strategies to see how they shake out.

10 Days in Asia I played 3 times this weekend and I think I may be souring on it. It's an interesting idea but it seems to end up having a really random finish. I had I think 9 different tiles I could draw or have discarded by Andrew for the win and turn after turn went by without getting any of them. Eventually Andrew drew one of the 7 tiles he needed and won. I feel like we both made interesting choices early and then sat around waiting for someone to randomly win. It might be a better 2 player game where you can try to control discards for what your opponent needs, and it might be a better game if each player had their own discard pile or something so it wasn't so trivial to bury 'good' tiles. (Eventually you reach a point where 2 of the discard piles have complete trash on top of them and then if your players are any good at game they just use the 3rd pile. In one of the games I got totally screwed because the person on my left drew the tiles I needed and therefore I never got a chance to play them as they were quickly covered up.)

Innovation remains fun. This game was a 4 players game where Adam was my partner and did a lot of cool things and I just sat around scoring points until I could play my one high level card and force the game to end suddenly by drawing out all the 10s.

I missed out on the 'high stakes' Barbu game which wasn't really very high at all because I was playing Titan, but that's ok. There's always next year!