Nerdy Black Friday recap

Games played:

King of Tokyo - review coming this week
Ra
Macao - review delayed for at least one more playing.

Game 1 King of Tokyo

Darren won, huzzah!  I would say it was due to my incredible skill, except that I got 3 or 4 extremely lucky rolls.

1) getting enough lightning bolts to buy the extra head first
2) 5 of a kind 1's, or 3 VP
3) 5 of a kind claws, or 5 damage to Mike which basically eliminated him from contention
4) a pair of triples, triple 3 and triple hearts.  Or another 3 VP plus a not insignificant heal when I needed it.

Game 2 Ra

More pure skill!  Not!

I really have no idea how to win this game.  I play not to suck, and every once in a while things work out.  The secret to not sucking is to buy stuff, and it really doesn't matter what it is initially.  I had a terrific round one, including an 8 tile buy during 'guts'.  Those 8 tiles pretty much won me the game, despite a horrific round 2 where I lost 2 points.  Luckily, the people that had good round 2's were the ones that had awful round 1's.  The game turned on suns, which seems to be normal.  I won by 3 points, and I was 2nd lowest suns.  If I had lost suns, I would have lost by 2.

Game 2 Macao

I need to do a little intro.  I do not know if I like this game yet or not.  The primary mechanism is very clever.  There are 6 currencies of influence, each with a different color and a corresponding die.  The die roll is how much you get and how long you have to wait to get it.  However, there is a shit load going on, and at least for the first time I played it, pacing was atrocious.  Pacing did improve as the game went on, so maybe...maybe pacing will improve with more play.  NF will definitely find out.

Anyways, while my internal jury is out on whether I like this game or not, my experience Friday was bad.  I made a couple-three strategic errors really early, knew I was in big big trouble, but still had to get my ass kicked for another 2 hours.



Anyways, my strategic error was sacrificing the future for turn 1 and 2 builds.  You just cannot trade away that much influence for early builds.  I also built marginal, expensive things.  I was scrambling to avoid getting punishment tokens, and I got them anyways.



Juan won, by making very shrewd buys and getting great synergy within his cards.