Monday, August 21, 2006
Tuesday 15th August
In Attendance:
Huw Morris
Ralph Grimble
Adrian Barnard
Only the three of us this week - a pretty poor show by recent standards. Still, there are plenty of good games that work with three players, so that's no problem. New landlord at the pub, but so far it doesn't appear it will cause a problem. In fact, we might have picked up a new gamer, since the guy behind the bar seemed very interested in joining in!
Adrian had brought along Amun Re, so we decided to give that a go.
Amun Re
We had all played this game before, but not in a long time. We had to spend a while going over the rules before we were ready to start. In the first era, I drew a load of bonus cards, but all of them seemed to be the type that give you three points for satisfying some criteria in the scoring round. With only three players, it's almost impossible to score more than one, since not all the territories are put up for auction. Anyway, Adrian and I took the bonus for biggest pyramid on each side of the river, and Adrian had a one point lead over me at halftime, with Ralph a few points back.
In the second era I made a couple of key plays which again secured me the largest pyramid bonus on one side of the river, while Ralph was able to take the bonus from Adrian on the other side. Ralph actually made up a lot of ground in the second era including the most money at the end, but it was just not quite enough. Final score: Huw 41 Adrian 34 Ralph 32.
This was the first time that I had played the game by focussing on exactly where the points are coming from, and it paid off. I'd like to play a few more times because I think I've finally seen the strategies you can employ. We all agreed that Amun Re is a decent game for three players, but would probably be improved with more. In particular, the auctions have more permutations with more players and more of the territories become available.
Adrian's comments:
A quiet night, but as ever, great company and an enjoyable game. Amun – Re.
The usual whinge from the winner half way through that he’d been playing like a donkey – 2nd/3 by 1 point, does that decry my game play / luck being in 1st? The 2nd half of the match pretty much hinged on taking a central territory I’d managed to build up well earlier. I had my ace up the sleeve in the form of a block card to prevent bidding up a mere 1 level. Huw however with a lot of money left from the first half had a card allowing him to bid above my bid – albeit 2 ahead, I had only to hope he now wouldn’t have the money to exploit the tactical win on the final bidding round,… Yeah right, like Huw makes errors like that! He’d actually pitched his bid at the calculated level to get all to bid exactly as they did. I’d love to say that sometimes I make unexpected moves to confuse his calculations, I’m sure in reality we know the truth and the result is only ever further capitalisation on the,… less than perfect response.
Plan B still enabled a second place for me but Huw soared into the lead complaining we’d knocked out various of his bonus scoring cards! I think Ralph ended up with a lot of bad breaks within the group that were re-learning the game, the usual last minute surge forward still only managed the 3rd place though the gap closed was large. I have to say I think I pretty much had all the right bonus cards at the right time, so I guess that makes for a less than perfect strategy on my part.
[Adrian – the carrot (one ahead of the donkey at half time! – Damn but he’s got sharp teeth and a long reach)]
