You can never have this...6/2 report

8:30 am gaming can be rough but 4 of us (Al, Ben, Jeff and myself) managed to get to Jeff's house around then. Not knowing when Rob would appear, we broke out a quick game of Nexus Ops. It was my first time and I would describe the game as a lightish "war" game that probably fills the same type of itch that other "war" games like risk and air baron fill but in like 1/3 the time. In my opinion that is a huge improvement as there is only so much I can take so I might pick this up to play with my friends in the future. Some bad early fortune for me was repaid with some fortunate card draws and at least average luck with the dice down the stretch to pull out a blitzkrieg victory with 6 vps (out of 12) coming over the final two turns.

Rob still was not there but we knew from a conversation with him that he would soon be so Ben, Jeff and I tried a quick game of Coloretto. We degenerated to mostly a care-bear style of play and with some help from lucky draws I pulled out yet another win (don't worry my comeuppance was yet to come and with a vengeance).

Rob had finally shown up but we were all starving so a quick trek over to taco c for lunch was our next mission. Having satiated all hunger requirements we returned to Jeff's to try our hand at one of Rob's latest acquisitions, Notre Dame.

Notre Dame (at the moment at least) appears to be to me what I wished Fairy Tale was: a game involving the draft mechanic in it that is not completely and totally inscrutable...all dragon hide grrr.... There are many facets that you want to work on at once and the trick is trying to balance everything to some degree. Like many games with a draft mechanic there is a strong incentive to be doing something different than the people to your right (who are feeding you cards), but some balance must be maintained(at least thats what it felt like with our first two plays).

In the first game, Rob and Al fed me plenty of park actions with the net result that most of my late game victory point grabbing actions were coming with a +3 vp bonus. We also had a scare with rats threatening to overrun us all at some point with two consecutive really bad rat draws but I think that was an anomaly. In the end I ran away with that one since the victory point bonus let me achieve an enormous score.

Having now seen the power of the park combined with the power of being the only one in that strategy, we tried again. This time parks were not as easy to come by and in fact I only ended up with 3 guys total in there (with My Buddy(TM) staying for a short time to boost it to 4 temporarily before heading to greener pastures). Jeff pursued a degenerate strategy of ignoring the rats completely and trying to tech up his victory point generator as soon as possible and it looked like it would win but some fortunate events regarding Notre Dame let me hold onto a second tighter victory (comeuppance coming, please don't worry). Having played it twice, I can safely say that with the insane amounts of interaction going on in the game, Simon will love this game (In case you didn't know I was being sarcastic).

Finally, it was time for my comeuppance. We played Citadels. Or rather I should say, Rob, Jeff, Ben and Al played Citadels. I pretended to play, but thanks to a rather amazing run with assassinations against me, ended up sitting in my cage with the 4 of them flaunting their turns at me "you can never have this, la la la la" they would say. It actually got amusing at some point, "who is assassinating me this turn?(an appropriate question always)"..."if you are trying to steal from Jeff you should clearly not steal from the King since Ben obviously has it since that is worst for me(unassailable logic). " Alas, I never got out of my cage and Rob ran away with it.

Comeuppance in hand, it was time to leave.