September 16, 2007

Nine Person Game Night

We hosted a pretty big game night yesterday evening. It started out with plans for just Brian, Wendy, and Tintin in addition to Luna and me for a total of five people. But Thomas, Matt, Ling, and Quyen (somehow pronounced like Quinn) showed up as well. Matt and Ling brought four huge pizzas from Mr. Pizza Man because they had organized a tailgate type party up in San Francisco and there were leftovers. I'd never heard of Mr. Pizza Man before. The pizzas aren't great, but they were free and a lot. They only brought cheese and pepperoni, which I don't like so much anyway, so maybe the ones with lots of toppings taste better. The crust was pretty nice where it met the pizza.

Quyen brought a big tub of games to choose from, but with nine people it was pretty hard finding a game. We played something called Bohnanza. Basically, each turn you are forced to plant beans that you have in your ordered hand or that you received by trading, and the goal is to create large bean patches that you sell into the discard piile in exchange for gold. There is a different number of each type of bean, which is inversely proportional to their gold value. Selling beans removes some number of those beans from the game. The person with the most gold at the end wins. I thought it was okay, but not really my type of game. Luna, however, likes it because it's straight-forward and moves quickly.

Next we played a six-player game of Settlers of Catan with the Seafarers expansion. The doubled-up teams were Matt and Ling, Luna and me, and Wendy and Brian. Even on the same team, Wendy and Brian didn't always act in agreement, which shouldn't be a surprise. I think if this game had involved military pieces, they'd have somehow gotten themselves into a civil war. :p Despite that, they won very handily because they were the primary producers of wheat, with enough sheep and ore to puchase a huge number of development cards. They ended up winning with cities, victory points and largest army, and always had a huge stock of resources since seven didn't come up very much. Luna and I were in second place, and would have done better if I had listened to Luna and placed our second settlement at the corner of some resoures on the other side of the board, but instead I chose the wood port on a single brick hex.

Luna keeps making fun of me for losing whenever we play Settlers of Catan. I think it's been too long and I'm out of practice, since when we played in North Carolina, it was often me or Alan in first place.

Posted by josuah at September 16, 2007 7:32 PM UTC+00:00