Agricola
3 player game of Agricola. I still can't decide what my favorite number of players to play Agricola with is, and that is to the designer's credit - a tremendous amount of work clearly went into tweaking the game to work well with 2, 3, 4, or 5.
This game ended up being very high scoring for 2 of the players and for the third player...less so. It is pretty tough to end up with negative score in Agricola, but our third player was a person who I believe has some kind of learning disability. They really enjoyed playing the game though, despite not doing well, and they kept the game moving, so I was glad to play with them.
(Apologies for the awkward third-person pronouns - I think it would be rude to reveal this person's identity).
Scores:
Jeff - 53
Chris - 48
N - -3
Game Time: 90 minutes
1889
This was my first foray into the labyrinthine economic world of the 18xx games. This series of games (there are dozens of them) would appear upon first glance to be rail games, and indeed during the game players do create a network of railroad tracks and stations and run trains over these tracks to collect money. The real game, however, is in the buying and selling of the shares of the corporations that own the stations and trains. The building of the rail network is still important, but only as a representation of how well each company is positioned to pay off its investors. The goal is to make the most money for *yourself* - and just like real life that doesn't necessarily mean running the best company.
Each 18xx game implements a simulated stock market and it is by buying and selling shares of the various railway corporations that the players' fortunes are made or broken (maked or breaked? that expression really doesn't work in the past tense). While sometimes it can be a viable strategy for a player to try and improve the company (or companies) in which he has a controlling interest, it can be an equally viable strategy to run the company to the point of near bankruptcy (hopefully picking up a nice profit on the way), then dump the stock, resulting in the transference of the controlling interest to another player, who now may find himself on the hook for replacing the company's rusting train fleet (do trains come in fleets?).
The 18xx games are not games in which new players are expected to do well, and this game was no exception. 3 new players, including myself, were taught the game by Tim, who beat us all handily. I tried to pull off what I thought was a clever gambit of the sort described above - dumping a nearly bankrupt company on a new player (Lane) just as its trains were going to be obsolete. While this did force him to spend all of his personal money and even to dump a few shares to buy a new train, this new train managed to do so well for him that he managed to shoot by me and almost overtake 2nd place by the end of the game.
While the end of the game did drag a bit - inexperienced players tend not to push the game towards conclusion as fast as they should - I found the concepts fascinating and by the end of the game (5-1/2 hours later!) I had a pretty good idea of at least some of the major mistakes I had made. Definitely looking forward to trying out this (or some other) 18xx game again in the near future.No exact scores unfortunately - they were all written down, but I forgot to make a note of them for myself. The positions are correct and the values are somewhere in the ballpark.
Yay! Tim posted the exact scores on BGG. Fixed now!
Scores:
Tim - $6880
Jeff - $5877
Lane - $5320
Chris - $4583
Game Time: 330 minutes
Maharajah: Palace Building in India 
This was a new one for me, suggested and taught by Dave. There was one other new player other than myself, and one who had not played in some time.
In this game, players are racing to be the first to build 7 palaces. Actually, usually multiple people will manage to do that at the same time (3 did in our game), so acquiring money is also quite important, as it is the tiebreaker. At the end of every turn, one of the 7 cities on the board is scored, and players are awarded money based on what kind of presence they have in that city.
Each player secretly selects 2 actions that they execute during their turn. These actions include building palaces, but also building houses (which allow you to increase your presence in a city and also to travel between cities more easily), changing the order in which cities will be scored (and cities can be scored multiple times during the game), and switching between various roles that each convey a different benefit to the players.
While this game has no luck (other than choosing which player initially holds which role), the hidden action-selection stops you from being able to plan too far ahead. Given what appears to be a fairly limiting constraint - if you get too far behind building palaces you are sunk - the game provides an impressive number of paths to victory - successful strategies can be built around careful route building, manipulation of scoring order, manipulation of roles and turn-order, or a combination of all of these things.
Scores:
Dave - 7 palaces, $14
Michael - 7 palaces, $8
Chris - 7 palaces, $7
Monika - 6 palaces
Becca - 5 palaces
Game time: 75 minutes
Agricola
The evening wrapped up with one more game of Agricola, this time with 4. This was my first foray into the I (for "Interactive") deck, and in fact the other players commented on how unused my cards felt.
I should also say that this day saw the first use of my animeeples to represent farm animals. I'm actually surprised at how much these add to my enjoyment of the game. Plus I can now use the cubes that originally represented animals to act as additional resources of other types (most notably wood, which runs out constantly).
The I deck, as the name would suggest, led to a lot of interactivity. Most notably, I had the Taster occupation, the current poster child for "this card is broken" discussions on the Agricola forum on BoardGameGeek (to say nothing of a couple of the players in this game). This card allows its owner to pay one food to the starting player to act first. It did not end up being overwhelmingly powerful in this game - in fact I only used it twice, but I can see situations where it would convey a huge advantage. It does force the other players to not rely on getting the first action of the round, but Agricola offers so many paths to victory that I believe you should be able to account for this. I would classify it as "powerful" and "annoying" but not necessarily "broken". Your mileage may vary. It should be noted that I didn't win.
This game was a little unusual in that a) nobody managed to get any animals breeding until very near the end of the game, which led to food being even tighter than usual and b) due to one player having an occupation that gave him 2 grain and 1 vegetable on the "take one grain" space at the cost of giving every other player a grain, there were scads of grain out by the end of the game - in fact we had to use the old sheep cubes to represent grain, and I don't think I'd ever seen grain even come close to running out before.
Scores:
Dan - 43
Chris - 42
Lane - 32
Tom - 30
Game Time: 120 minutes
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