St Petersburg & Port Royal - 6 December 2017

Four of us at Andy's for games so of course we had to play St Petersburg (and eat fridge cake).  Another close game, harder to get big collections of nobles with four players, especially when you go through the buildings as quick as we did.  Final scores: James 50, Adrian 43, David 41, Andy 40.

We also played Port Royal again - I didn't make a note of the scores but I think that although I got to 12 victory points first, Adrian overtook me to reach 13 in the last round.

St Petersburg and Port Royal - 27th January 2016

A series of unfortunate events resulted in Andy missing the news that the venue had switched from Adrian's to David's and consequently enjoying the chance to explore a lot more town than he was intending.

Given the delayed start we decided to go straight to an old favourite - St Petersburg with no need for rules reading and a quick setup. James looked to be disadvantaged in the first turn with the last most expensive pick of workers, but his luck turned when he had first pick of buildings and the Observatory appeared. With its ability to select a card pile and either buy, hold or discard the top card, James then built up an advantage in workers, and then with finances assured, switched to building a large collection of aristocrats. A couple of lucky draws cemented his victory (but I think he'd have won without this). Although it wasn't immediately clear, it turned out that the rest of us were scrapping for second place.

Final score: James: 108, David: 75, Stu 66, Andy: 61

The was enough time to bring out one of David's Christmas presents: Port Royal. This is a quick card game based around the idea of collecting people and ships to build up victory points. It has some clever mechanisms:

Face-up cards have the value of what is shown on the card, but face down cards are used as currency. This means that you can't rely on certain cards coming up later - they may well have been used to pay for something without you knowing about it.

It has a push-your-luck gameplay. You keep drawing cards to create a tableau from which you can make your purchases. However if two ships of the same colour appear your turn is abandoned. Drawing a lot of cards can also give others the chance to purchase cards on your turn, but this can be a source of income as you are paid a tax. Some of the characters have special abilities that encourage you to go for large draws, creating an interesting conflict.

The game played well, although the utility of some cards wasn't hugely apparent on first play. It was reasonably close until the end when Stu and James jumped ahead through completing expeditions to finish the game.

Final score: Stu: 18 James: 17, David: 15 and Andy: 13