Chris (The Unnamable, now dubbed "Sir Chris" by Beth to keep them straight when talking to one or the other at the table) arrived within 5 minutes of 6 PM. We weren't sure if anyone else would be along for a while, so we ordered some pizza, planning to get enough for the other two guys anyway, and decided to play
For Sale while we waited for the pizza to be ready.
Midway through our game our second guest arrived, Chris (TylerChuit), whom we had expected to arrive around 7:30. His plans had been changed, so he arrived earlier. It was unexpected, but cool! We finished our game of For Sale, with Sir Chris making a killing at over $100,000! The highest that we had seen prior to that was in the $70,000s.
Chris hooked up his Ipod to play a video review from
Board Games With Scott about
Small World. The explanation on the video was entertaining while we ate our pizza and we were able to get into the game pretty quickly after that.
Beth joined us for a 4-player game and Chris started us off, choosing Swamp Orcs initially. He took a decent amount of ground. Beth then blew away all expectations when she took the Trident-things. You know, those fish people. She had a Command bonus which allowed her to stomp through open areas easily, picking up 10 points in her first turn. Sir Chris then started his undead army, and I opened up using some trolls to move into the territories that Beth had previously taken.
Chris continued on with his Orcs in his next turn, but Beth was forced to move on to a new race because she had spread herself so thin. She still picked up a decent amount of points though, and that first race held on for quite a while afterward. Sir Chris picked up some Skeletons to go along with his Ghouls from earlier. I tried to take out Beth as much as I could before switching from my rock Trolls to Underworld Hobbits. I was able to spread out quite a bit while the Trolls just held their ground, reinforced with rocks from the bonus that I had picked up with them.
Later in the game Chris picked up Dwarves because they had such a big bonus on them, but it seems that he was too limited by the small number that he got. Beth got Amazons which lasted her quite a while, but I worked my way through them with my Hobbits. Actually, having Underworld with the Hobbits made them very effective so I was popping up all over the board making attacks. Near the end of the game I had considered keeping the Hobbits since 4 of my Trolls were still holding on, but I thought that I might have a better shot at picking up points by getting one more race and Chris advised that I do the same since I'd probably be stuck doing nothing in the last turn if I didn't switch at that point.
I ended the game with the Forest Elves since I was able to pick up 3 bonus points along with them and had two forest areas that I could capture for more bonuses. The only other option I was considering would have cost more to pick up in the first place and then probably would have picked up the same number of points anyway. I probably would have won either way at that point though, since I had about 10 points more than either Chris, who were only one point apart, and quite a bit over Beth's score.
We decided to finish out the night with a game of Sleuth. Neither Chris had played before, so I tried to give them a brief explanation of the game. After the explanation Chris seemed disinterested but went along with it anyway since it fit the time frame we had. There didn't seem to be any major points of frustration, at least not once the first round had passed, in which Chris had gotten disappointed over not seeing any cards from his first search for "Green." I think the game lasted about 20 minutes before I had made the correct deduction.
We chatted for a while afterward, talking about crazy things that have happened at jobs, and other things before our guests went home and we settled in at our computers for the night.
