Thursday games with Tony and Zhentao (2/3)

Carc with expansion! Zhentao and Tony finally agreed to add an expansion to this game, and Inns and Cathedrals are mild enough that it doesn't change much of the game, so off we go. I drawn both Cathedrals, placing one in Tony's large city, hoping that he wouldn't complete it, and placing the other one in my large city, hoping that I could complete it. In the end, both of us gave up on completing our Cathedral cities, and ended up scoring nothing for those cities...oops. Tony's was just one tile short, though (the SW city in the picture).

One of the most interesting feature was the one on the NW corner. Tony first had a city there, however, Zhentao built two cities nearby, threatening to join them together and making Tony's city useless. To complete all of these cities, though, they needed a 3-sided city tile. There was one 4-sided city tile in the original set of tiles, but I drew that one, so I didn't complete that city for them. The 3-sided tiles came very late in the game. There were the two Cathedrals in the expansion, but of course I drew those, so that didn't work. Just when we were thinking that there was no way that those cities could be completed, Zhentao drew a 4-disjoint-city tile from the expansion! He didn't get the huge city, but he did complete two cities, Tony completed his one city, and they all got tons of points for that. In addition, Zhentao farmed in the middle of that tile, so he got 12 points off of that farm. Doh.

The big meeples only came into play once, when I was competing for that (what end up being) a small city on the extreme SE. Zhentao was not happy...heh.

Close to the end, Tony drew a tile and placed it quickly. But later he wanted to change it so that he could join a farmer to the giant farm. Too bad, we said no. And what happened was that had we let Tony join that farm, he would have tied for first place for the game! This is almost reminiscent of a previous game that we played...so proper farming is important!

Final scores: Me 92, Tony 85, Zhentao 108.

Afternoon gaming with Zhentao (4/4)

One final game with Zhentao before we were done for the day. Carcassonne was played, and this time, he got the upper hand. In fact, I lost pretty badly...heh. Maybe that's why I don't remember much of the details...

Final scores: Me 78, Zhentao 127.

Afternoon gaming with Zhentao (1/4)

4 games were played in Zhentao's office between Zhentao and I. First game: Meeples! I only remember that somehow I kept closing cities that were nearly impossible to close, and somehow I have meeples in my hand all the time. Maybe that's how I won the game...heh. Scores: Me 120, Zhentao 113.

Last game of the night: Carcassonne! Or rather, Meeple or Noople! We didn't have much time, and decided that we would not talk or give suggestions during the game. Instead, we will flip a tile ahead of time, keep it to ourselves and have a headstart in the thinking process. Sure, that sounds fine, except it didn't turn out exactly as we have hoped. Instead, sometimes we played so quickly that one didn't know it was his turn... And a lot of times, we think for a long time even with the headstart, since situations changed rapidly.

This was a game of incomplete cities. Tony and Zhentao both built a city near each other, which joined up to a big incomplete city. However, Zhentao had yet another city nearby, which could potentially join up to an even bigger city, giving Tony no points for it. I played the spoiler by placing the 4-sided city tile on the big city, making it difficult to complete. Tony pulled a tile that had two separate one-city blocks on two sides, which he was planning to use to prevent Zhentao from joining up the other city, but he couldn't use it now that I have placed that 4-sided city. So then the only way to complete that giant city was to get a 3-sided city tile with a farm on the fourth side, and only Zhentao would have wanted that tile. By chance, Zhentao never got that tile, so those cities remained incomplete until the end of the game, which was good news for me.

We had at least a couple of other medium-sized cities incompleted, which made farmers not so useful. There were two giant farms, one of which had one meeple each from Tony and I, serving 2 cities (however, Tony sneaked another one in at the end, so he got those 6 points), and another one that had one meeple each from Zhentao and I serving 4 cities (and Tony tried hard to get into this farm, and he only needed one simple road tile to do it, which Zhentao got as the last tile of the game...). The final score was such that if Tony got the tile he wanted and joined a farmer to that 12-point farm, he would have won by 1 point! But he didn't, so I won...for the first time in this trio game group! Yay! But yeah, it was a close game, and we had no idea who was going to win for sure until the end. Good one.

Final scores: Tony 53, Zhentao 58, Me 64.