by Sharon Khan
We were 4. Sami and I started by playing some Magic: The Gathering, while waiting for the others to arrive – Sami was saved from a double mulligan by their arrival, but honourably took it anyway the next day! Richard didn’t want to start with Through the Ages, so instead we played The City followed by The Settlers of Catan. Sami had a bit of a gift in Settlers, as him (very limited!) numbers flooded at the start, and he was holding handfuls of cards and giving away more cards to the robber than most of us had received! He rapidly built a couple of cities, then a couple of settlements and roads for longest road. The second place was a tie between Marion and I on 5 points, with Richard just behind on 4 – to give you an impression of how much of a walkover it was!Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization was the first time for Richard at our house, although he’d been playing at home. It was very close between Sami and I, with us exchanging positions constantly at end game, and me just winning thanks to a lucky card on Marion’s last turn. Marion played a reasonable game, but couldn’t keep up with us point-wise, and Richard lagged behind.
After that I suggested Antike, which we’d played the week before. We taught it to Richard, who hadn’t played before. We all started by arming and expanding quickly this game, and very rapidly we all had 5 cities, unlike last game, and then starting diverging in how we progressed. I remembered it rather better this week, and was challenging with Sami for the win all game, expanding heavily to get all the expansion VPs, while he concentrated on research. Marion was able to build up her position better than last week, and got more regions, and several temples, but still wasn’t very aggressively going for VPs. Richard was too busy learning the mechanics to worry about how to win this time around. I managed to just beat Sami to the last VP, thanks to Marion taking out his temple, and him not being able to retaliate back but it was very close.