Thursday, November 27, 2008

One Goddamn Reed!

I planned out the 60 point game of Agricola on the bus this morning, where I'd get a fireplace and a well and a stone oven and 60 or more points depending on how the cards came out. The cards came out nicely - Sheep came out second which meant when I slaughtered them for food I had 4 more food than in the worst case scenario. Then Family Growth came out first in its group, so I was able to reorder my plans and have a baby two turns sooner than planned and get two extra actions. That put me well ahead of the plan, but I had to do a lot of work to figure out the consequences as some actions which depended on a certain number of resources being available couldn't be brought forward. Then in about round 12 it all went screwy - I'd forgotten to gather food for the last harvest, and I had no reeds for the Renovation to stone - I'd taken reeds in round 5, when I should have taken them in round 6. I had to move Family Growth without Space from round 13 to round 14 in order to take reeds, which meant I had one action less in the last round and couldn't take sheep. Having one sheep instead of 8 cost me 3 points, and I ended up with 58!

As I write this I think I probably could have planned to eat a cow (which would have cost me a point) but I would have been able to do the Family Growth (which would have got me an extra action, 7 sheep and 3 points). Maybe that's what I get for playing at bed time.

Earlier in the evening I played Dominion with the kid... we used a random deck for the first time. It was Bureaucrat, Chancellor, Witch, Spy, Market, Woodcutter, Smith, Remodel, Adventurer and umm... maybe the Money Changer - no cost 2 cards. We both took Witches of course, and both used Remodel to change Curses into Estates. However I took fewer action cards than he did, got more money, and when I started remodelling Golds into Provinces I was well ahead. Remodel defined the game more than the Witch did, no matter how much fun she is. I remodelled my Estates into Remodels, and planned to remodel my Remodels into Gold, but that never quite worked. With no +2 Actions and no Chapel to hurry things along it was a bit of a longer game than I've played before. My final score was 54, the kid was 29.

Edit: CyberKev points out that we played with too many Province cards - you're only supposed to have 8 in a 2 player game.

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