Mini-TringCons are all-day house gaming events run by the organiser of
TringCon, in Deepest
Buckinghamshire.
I started the day with
Isle of Skye,
a new Carcassone-like game with an intriguing bidding mechanic.
Each round, everyone draws three tiles, then secretly marks one for
discarding and two with money.
The screens are removed, the tiles marked for discarding are
discarded, and then each player gets a chance to buy one of someone
else's tiles – at the price shown by the amount of money next to the
tile. If a tile of yours is bought, you get back the money you marked
it with and the same again from the buying player. If not, you pay the
money you marked it with to the bank.
So you may end up with as many as three tiles, or none at all. Then
you have to add them to your island, bearing in mind scoring criteria,
which vary from game to game and (in a predictable way) from round to
round.
I'm usually terrible at Carcassone, so I was surprised to pull out a
reasonably close second place here.
On to Suburbia,
and with two new players I didn't use the new Five Star expansion.
Unfortunately I forgot the cost of playing an investment marker, but I
don't think it distorted the game too badly.
It all got fairly messy, with most of us going into negative income at
some point. I managed to avoid this, but yellow came from last place
to win by maximising his income, getting the Casino to keep it high as
his score increased, and simply buying good tiles towards the end.
As the sun sank, we brought out old favourite
Splendor, at
which I did quite appallingly badly. Some of this was switching
strategies during the game, some was trying to monopolise a resource
for which there wasn't really much demand. Maybe some bad luck too.
We finished the day with a couple of games of
Port Royal,
the sort of game that would normally hit my abstraction gap (too
thematic to be an abstract game, too abstract to be a simulation) but
managed to work anyway. Ships provide money, with which you hire crew,
who give benefits, basically. I won the second round by remembering to
use the "buy stuff cheaply" power.
A pleasant day and I'll go again when I have a first Saturday free.
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