Alea Iacta Est & Maori - 19 August 2015

The three player version of Alea Iacta Est dispenses with the Templum and Fortuna cards, removing on the options and strategies of the game.  This makes the Senate Cards even more important and James maxed out on cards which provided extra bonuses.  We all had about the same points based on the provinces and citizens, but the Senate Card bonuses gave the final scores of James 54, David 38 and Andy 33.

Time then for a game of Maori - the island exploration game.  Andy had a bit of bad luck with island opportunities at the beginning of the game and couldn't catch up, and the final scores were James 49, David 43 and Andy 18.

Hacienda & Maori - 23 October 2013

We played the rather clever Hacienda again this evening.  Quite close in the final scoring but Orhan's huge stable of horses and unhindered growth on one side of the board won him the game.  After Andy left, the remaining four played a game of Maori (in fact both previous times we've played Hacienda, we have also finished with this).  It's rather neat and we introduced a special rule where the 16 exploration tiles are discarded and drawn again if all players pass on the opportunity to pick up a tile, otherwise the amount of useless tiles starts to make the game drag.  The new rule worked a treat and we had an extremely close game which Kieron managed to win.

Hacienda: Orhan 123, James 110, Kieron 100, David 99 and Andy 95


Maori: Kieron 37, James 36, David 35, Orhan 27

Hacienda & Maori - 6 March 2013

Unusually, we played the same pair of new games as the previous week, but with an extra couple of players for each game.  They worked just as well with more players, although I think it made Maori more random - and we were close to a position where no-one wanted the set of tiles available.  Both were pretty close games, but host Stuart was triumphant each time.

Hacienda: Stuart 142, Orhan 139, David 127, Kieron 126 and James 114
Maori: Stuart 35, James 32, Kieron 27, David 23

Hacienda & Maori - 27 February 2013

Disappointingly only two of us made it to Andy's place this week.  James brought along his collection of unplayed Christmas presents and we started with Hacienda.  This is a game by Wolfgang Kramer, designer of many many games including El Grande, Tikal, El Capitan and Princes of Florence from our collections (so probably second to Knizia in the games we play).

The players are Argentinian ranchers cultivating land, breeding herds, and building haciendas.  Money is spent on land and animals, and earned through harvests and taking animals to market.  Points are scored in the middle and the end of the game from things like largest herd, building around water, and numbers of markets visited.  This latter element brings the players into conflict, trying to build to markets before they are full.  Another fun and clever game that played in about 90 minutes with just three of us.  Yet another win for Kieron on 155 points, with James just behind on 152 and Andy trailing on 72, having perhaps bred animals and taken them to market before cultivating enough land to earn more points.

With Kieron not 100% healthy, he then left, and Andy and James tried out Maori.  This is a cracking little game with a ship that explores around a sea of tiles that are collected by each player on a board, building up a map of islands that score points depending on the huts, palm trees and garlands they contain.  We were chatting as well but I think once we'd gone through the simple rules, we played this game in not much more than 20 minutes.  Definitely a good one to finish up an evening with.  Neat idea, great quality pieces and opportunities to steal the pieces others want, and (slightly reminiscent of Ra) some brinkmanship in whether you wait for the perfect tile to be pulled out of the bag.  James won with 62 points (thanks mainly to a huge four tile island with lots of palm trees) with Andy on 40.