Sunday, 25 February 2007

Ra - 15 February

The first outing for James' Christmas game from Kieron. Ra is our second Egyptian game this year and the players compete to build monuments, develop civilizations and benefit from the flooding Nile across three Epochs. The game has a very neat bidding mechanism - auctions can be forced by cards or by a player calling "Ra", and then each player uses one of their three counters to bid for the tiles currently on the auction track.

Andy bid early in each Epoch leaving him little to do for the remainder of each phase, but David made good use of calling "Ra" allowing him to bid last with low counters. Ultimately though it was these low counters that lost him first place at the end... the final points tally includes +5 for the player with the highest sum of counters at the end, and -5 for the player with the least.

James lost the piece of paper with the results on so we are relying on the superior recall of Stuart, who writes:

The result of the first Ra game is not in doubt. I am not likely to forget a win in a game that doesn't involve combat, taking out Deej, random aggressive actions or huge amounts of luck:) Kieron and myself remember the scores being 34 to myself, 33 each to James and Kieron, 30 to Deej (who would have won without the -5 penalty at the end). I think Andy was playing, but he spent most of the game inactive so it was hard to tell.

A good game to play again soon.

1 comment:

David said...

In my opinion a great game, but opinions were very divided. Both Andy and Stu were unimpressed.

For me though this was what a clever game should be all about - the player interactions are subtle but significant. You don't slam some big army on someone and take them out of the game (sorry Stu), but instead you have to work out how the other players will react to what you do. The way the bidding works has a good balancing effect, but also offers great opportunities for bluff and "Derren"-ing. This one's all about psychology!