Gaming Session

A completely epic gaming night, and we played some great titles. We started quickly with Shadow Hunters and it ended up being no contest as Stephen was a neutral Charles and was able to get everyone in the same place and blast them all with a machine gun, meet his win condition, and end the game quickly. Probably the shortest SH game I've ever played. We then divided into two groups where one played Egizia (one of my favorites), and I taught Small World with two players new to it. I am still having difficulty getting my timing down with declining races, but it was again fun, there is great variety in the game. 

After our ping-pong/ pool half-time, one group played Power Grid and my group tried a new game, Ninjato. Its a game of 7 turns & 3 scoring rounds where you have three actions each turn represented by nifty wooden shuriken (throwing stars). You can train at the dojo to get cards used for other actions, learn skills from the sensei, attack clan houses by defeating guards to obtain treasures, and then use those treasures to either bribe envoys or collect rumors. Each element fits together nicely, and you see how important your choices are in the scoring rounds. You can't do everything, so there are interesting choices to get the most honor points. I kept setting off alarms at the clan houses and could never fully defeat them. Tyler jumped to large lead early and we couldn't quite catch him. I did get to throw one of the shuriken at Nate though, but it didn't stick.

Josh is either worried about Nate, or how late it is

Check out the cool shuriken markers!

We decided to start using points and keep track of our placement in each game to make things a bit more interesting. I'm calling it the LaMont Boardgamers (LMB), and here are the LMB standings criteria:

A. For games that have a positional finish, points depend upon the number of players:
3 (9, 5, 2); 4 (10, 7, 4, 1); 5 (10, 7, 5, 3, 1); 6 (10, 8, 6, 4, 2, 1); 7 (10, 8, 7, 5, 4, 2, 1); 8 (10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 1); 9 (10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1); 10 (10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0)
B. For games with only a winner or group of winners, the winners earn 7 points, others get 3.
C. An LMB member's points are then divided by the number of games played to arrive at their standings score.
D. To qualify a member must have played a minimum of 1.5 games per group session.         

Shadow Hunters: Winner - Stephen; Losers - Brett, Tyler, Garrett, Josh, Nate, Tim
Egizia: 1st- Josh, 2nd- Nate, 3rd- Tyler, 4th- Dallin
Small World: 1st- Brett, 2nd- Garrett, 3rd- Stephen, 4th- Tim
Power Grid: 1st- Dallin, 2nd- Garrett, 3rd- Tim
Ninjato: 1st- Tyler, 2nd- Brett, 3rd- Nate, 4th- Josh

So after this last session, here are the standings so far:
March sessions: 1
Brett H: 3,10,7 (20) = 6.7
Tyler H: 3,4,10 (17) = 5.7
Stephen M: 7,4 (11) = 5.5
Garrett S: 3,7,5 (15) =5.0
Dallin E: 1,9 (10) = 5.0
Josh D: 3,10,1 (14) = 4.7
Nate J: 3,7,4 (14) = 4.7
Tim R: 3,1,2 (6) = 2.0