Some days are just Mondays

I showed up at Dragon's Lair at the advertised 6ish. Scott and Dennis were slogging their way through a Strat-O-Matic baseball session, with Scott playing my team. I'm sort of happy to learn that the losing streak I was on with the team was my poor managerial decisions, and not the team itself.

Brian and I decided to play Football Strategy, just to prove to everyone that I'm not really a sports guy. I seemed to be doing decent, with both Brian and I providing stunning defense and preventing scoring until late in the first period - then the wheels started to come off. Now, I'm admittedly bad at actual football strategy, but this seemed pretty straightforward. You look at a matrix of possible plays - offense calls the column, defense shows their pre-selected row. You can both see all possible outcomes. There HAS to be optimal plays, although a lot of the decisions are trying to get inside your opponent's head. I apparently failed to do this - at one point it was 2nd and 30 from my own 1-yard-line... it's hard to work out of that hole. I think somewhere around the third period I gave up rationality, and kept going for the highly un-optimal "Razzle Dazzle". It payed off big a few times, but led to some turnovers as well. The final score at the merciful end of the game (don't you DARE call a time-out!!) was 30-0. Youch. I had fun despite my pounding, and am determined to figure out some optimal strategy for this crazy thing.

The next game to come out is the newest craze sweeping the board game community, Agricola. I muddled my way through my first game, often feeling like there were too many choices for my tiny family to work through - but I accidentally stumbled into causing a massive food shortage for everyone but me on the first harvest. Sorry about those crops, guys! I swear, I thought it was fertilizer... Somehow at game end I had four cattle, four pigs, an occupation that let me ignore negative points for things I was short on, and a fairly high scoring major development. This brought my score to 27, tied with Brian, and Dennis coming in at 26. I honestly think my score was a fluke - but I'm intrigued enough to want to play again soon.

We finished off the night with a short 2-player Race for the Galaxy... just like old times...