24th March 2009 Session Report: The One Where We Played Nice

Siew Min and her bf De Cruz came over for dinner tonight. I started them off on High Society after dinner, as a warm-up of sorts. We played 2 games and interestingly the random nature of the end game condition led to 2 extremes. The first game ended within the first few auctions with the 4 red bordered cards literally coming up consecutively. Siew Min ended up with the only luxury card but was eliminated due to having the least cash left. De Cruz and I however each had a x2 multiplier yet without any luxury cards. I figure cash left would serve as the tie-breaker but it slipped my mind during the game. The 2nd game went to the final card. I took the -5 card and had to discard one luxury card but still ended up with 40+ points without being left with the least cash. The other 2 used up their small denominations early on which proved highly detrimental as I managed to obtain a couple of luxury cards with minimum bids uncontested.

We continued with Settlers of Catan which was probably the only game Siew Min was open to play since she emerged victorious on her first go. I guess Catan is a good gateway game because the experienced players can always adjust the competitiveness. In this case, Van and I went easy on the 2 of them, trading with them frequently and while we did 'rob' them occasionally, it was only done when they were in the lead. It helped that they traded generously with each other which smoothen the learning curve somewhat. De Cruz ended up the victor (somehow the first timer always gets the win!) with the longest road, and a VP card. Siew Min and I were tied on 9 - she had 2 VP cards while I had control of the largest army. Van wasn't far behind with 8. It seemed the both of them enjoyed the game and De Cruz found it interesting, this being his first go at a eurogame. Hopefully, I'll have an opportunity to introduce them to something like Stone Age in future.