August 30th, 2009
We had our almost-monthly book club meeting on the 30th - the book was "How to Travel with a Salmon", a collection of essays by Umberto Eco that was obsessed with its own cleverness and erudition to the point of being unreadable (though to be fair even Eco's good books toe that line, so if you've ever said "you know, Nabakov isn't quite smug enough for me", you'll probably want to check him out). But snarky comments about accomplished and respected authors is another blog entirely, so back to the matter at hand.
After the book club, we played a few games of Dominion. For the first game, I was joined by Trevor (who had played a few times before) and Thorsten (who was playing the game for the first time). It being Thorsten's first game played with the starting set from the base game. The base set leads to fairly rote strategies, so it tends to come down to luck and timing, which this time were on my side.
Scores:
Chris - 36
Thorsten - 30
Trevor - 24
Game Time: 30 minutes
The cool thing about Dominion is that every game is different. Once you've added the expansion, there are 50 different action cards, 10 of which are in play for each game. It's been a while since I took probability, but 50-pick-10 is...a big big number, so if you start each game by picking a random set of 10 cards, your odds of ever playing with the same set of 10 twice are vanishingly small. Once you see your set of action cards, the game is very much like a probability puzzle - how can that set of cards be used to construct the most efficient possible deck.
For the second game we dealt out a random set of action cards. This time the set included the Gardens, victory point cards that are worth 1 point for every 10 cards in your deck at the end of the game. I'd been beaten badly by players using this card in the past, so I decided to try and use it, but I didn't look carefully at the card environment - this set of cards did not include many extra buys, so it was difficult to get my deck big enough to take full advantage of the Gardens (and in fact I ended with only 29 cards and 5 gardens - one more card would have given me 5 more points). Thorsten, meanwhile, applied advanced German engineering and logic to the problem and was able to construct a very efficient deck and end the game by impressively buying 2 provinces (6-victory-point cards) on the final turn.
Scores:
Thorsten - 40
Chris - 36
Trevor - 24
Game time: 30 minutes
For the final game we were joined by Thorsten's wife Alana who was also new to the game. She received a little coaching from Hilary and we were off. This game introduced the Swindler for the first time. The Swindler lets you replace a card in each other player's deck with a card of the same cost. This slowed the game down considerably as we merrily sabotaged each other's decks, but eventually I won a close game. It wasn't the cleanest of first game's for Alana, but she seemed to get the hang of it all right.
Scores:
Chris - 23
Thorsten - 22
Trevor - 20
Alana - 18
Game time: 40 minutes
We had our almost-monthly book club meeting on the 30th - the book was "How to Travel with a Salmon", a collection of essays by Umberto Eco that was obsessed with its own cleverness and erudition to the point of being unreadable (though to be fair even Eco's good books toe that line, so if you've ever said "you know, Nabakov isn't quite smug enough for me", you'll probably want to check him out). But snarky comments about accomplished and respected authors is another blog entirely, so back to the matter at hand.After the book club, we played a few games of Dominion. For the first game, I was joined by Trevor (who had played a few times before) and Thorsten (who was playing the game for the first time). It being Thorsten's first game played with the starting set from the base game. The base set leads to fairly rote strategies, so it tends to come down to luck and timing, which this time were on my side.
Scores:
Chris - 36
Thorsten - 30
Trevor - 24
Game Time: 30 minutes
The cool thing about Dominion is that every game is different. Once you've added the expansion, there are 50 different action cards, 10 of which are in play for each game. It's been a while since I took probability, but 50-pick-10 is...a big big number, so if you start each game by picking a random set of 10 cards, your odds of ever playing with the same set of 10 twice are vanishingly small. Once you see your set of action cards, the game is very much like a probability puzzle - how can that set of cards be used to construct the most efficient possible deck.For the second game we dealt out a random set of action cards. This time the set included the Gardens, victory point cards that are worth 1 point for every 10 cards in your deck at the end of the game. I'd been beaten badly by players using this card in the past, so I decided to try and use it, but I didn't look carefully at the card environment - this set of cards did not include many extra buys, so it was difficult to get my deck big enough to take full advantage of the Gardens (and in fact I ended with only 29 cards and 5 gardens - one more card would have given me 5 more points). Thorsten, meanwhile, applied advanced German engineering and logic to the problem and was able to construct a very efficient deck and end the game by impressively buying 2 provinces (6-victory-point cards) on the final turn.
Scores:
Thorsten - 40
Chris - 36
Trevor - 24
Game time: 30 minutes
For the final game we were joined by Thorsten's wife Alana who was also new to the game. She received a little coaching from Hilary and we were off. This game introduced the Swindler for the first time. The Swindler lets you replace a card in each other player's deck with a card of the same cost. This slowed the game down considerably as we merrily sabotaged each other's decks, but eventually I won a close game. It wasn't the cleanest of first game's for Alana, but she seemed to get the hang of it all right.Scores:
Chris - 23
Thorsten - 22
Trevor - 20
Alana - 18
Game time: 40 minutes
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