Lancaster - 3 February 2016

Four player Lancaster for a little Plantagenet fun on a Wednesday.  As per usual the difficulty of optimising all elements of the game (knight placement, battles, the laws, and collection of nobles) made for a damn close run thing.  Final scores: Adrian 51; James 49; David 45; Stu 41.

St Petersburg - 10th February 2016

We took a trip over to Andy's this week, and quickly settled down for a game of St Petersburg. During set-up we took the decision to remove the Observatories from play. Our previous experience (including James' victory romp two weeks ago) is that if the Observatory comes out early the person who obtains it has a massive advantage. This did mean that the building pile was two cards light, but we decided to give it a go.

Compared to last time, the game was a lot tighter, with everyone but Stu trying to keep pace on aristocrats while looking to take an advantage elsewhere. Andy built up a large income in workers, but was lacking in victory points. David failed to build his worker supply, but managed to generate reasonable income from the other phases to compensate.

For much of the game Stu and David were neck and neck, but David managed to pull ahead at the end.

Final score was David 93, Stu 75, Adrian 71 and Andy 68.

I think the game played better without the Observatory. Something else we could try is to put them into the second half of the deck.