We had a great weekend of playing with the new games. I seem to be the heavyweight lately, especially withchoiceful not around to dominate the Puerto Rico/San Juan[1]. I won Barbu for the 6th time in the last 8 games, I've definitely got the hang of it. But there is more to learn - Andy, Rob and I practiced bid together on a set of 7 hands. While I think Andy misestimated a No Last Two hand (Rob and I didn't like it at all), on several other contracts he seemed to be analyzing them better than I was, so we all have more to learn. I predict duplicate Barbu will help that enormously, but we need 8 players and we only have 5 or 6. I suspect I'm better at playing than at declaring/bidding (ie I think I make losing doubles more often than Andy[2] does). Though we'll learn that from the statistics we keep talking about computing (we save all our scores as spreadsheets, so we have the data ready).

Then Rob & I tied for a win at Ticket To Ride, which was a great game. Just as advertised, it had simple rules and complex gameplay, which is great. The Spiel Des Jahr did not let us down. I did well at picking up the essential principles immediately, I think it helped a little that I've played several other rail games (ie Empire Builder), so am used to thinking about minimal edge sets to span a vertex set...er, I mean, minimal track laying to reach all your destinations :).

Then the bloodthirsty Friedmans and a couple others played Warhammer Quest and I played San Juan with neophytes resipisco, jhogan, and Daniel[3]. jhogan made a good run but I ended up winning.

Then we tried Power Grid, which was a lot more complicated than Ticket To Ride, although not super-complicated on the general scale of games. I seriously mis-analyzed it and made a couple big strategic errors, others seemed to play better, and Daniel eked out jhogan by a small margin. It had a lot of negative feedback which is a little frustrating, it looks to me like a large part of playing well is "gaming" the games negative feedback mechanism by keeping low on the resource it uses to track your progress while developing everything else first. I didn't realize this and was out in front, and when the feedback got stronger in the mid/late game I was screwed. At the end, the game seems to turn into one of these "If I don't block A then he will win, but if I block A then B will win" kind of things where the result depends on who chooses to block who and how well they do it. (Like Illuminati). Which I don't like, its fun to have some interdependency between the players, but I don't like it quite this strong, and it seems to add a lot of randomness to the endgame. I like randomness, but I prefer it to be a constant factor to be dealt with throughout the game. Still, there is plenty to the game, and I'll definitely be playing it again.

Finally, Rob, arcanepackrat and I played Ticket to Ride again. Rob had a lot of low scoring tickets and short segments, and arcanepackrat tried to grab a couple too-long routes and we blocked him, so even though I got blocked once for a 22 point swing I was able to win by a fair bit. Both games I seemed to get tickets that worked fairly well together, though in the first game I made a big mistake keeping a ticket where I didn't get anywhere near either of the two cities.

[1] And to pleasantly distract me? Nah, its pleasant but I don't think I actually get distracted, I'm very singleminded about games.[a]

[2] Yes, Andy is the standard of comparison. If I'm the monster, he's the demi-monster.

[3] I failed at remembering/figuring out his LJ username.

[a] Note to self: having admitted this, must only use "My girlfriend distracted me" as an excuse for losing to people who don't read this journal.
So I won 4 out of 5 - woohoo! I'm very glad that choiceful started game day, I get a lot of enjoyment from playing and from how much fun everyone else has too. I've definitely got the Fun, Friends, Romance, Hobbies parts of my life covered, if only I could do better on Work I'd truly have it all...been thinking about applying at Google lately, we'll see.