Boardgaming: 7 Wonders, Cash & Guns, and Castles of Burgundy

I realized that if I don't write down the gaming I've done, then I (a) forget what I played and (b) forget the names of the people I played with. At Tabletop, I'm playing with different people every week, so it's very easy to lose track of names. So these may be a bit dull, but I'm writing down notes about it anyway.

 

I bailed on last Thursday due to snow, but last night was clear so I went out and brought Corwyn with me again. Fred had already started a game of Urbanization with Tim and two other people I didn't know, so Corwyn and I ate dinner and then I prowled around looking for a game I could crash.  Actually, there were five people at the table next to me playing 7 Wonders (which I love), so I asked if I could get in on the next game. They chased me off with an 'I'm not sure we'll be playing another game', so chastened I hid in the store with Corwyn. Then fifteen minutes later the person who had chased me off ran me down and asked if I wanted to join and apologized for chasing me off. ("I was surly about the game because I was losing, not at you.") Crit fail on socializing averted!

 

I asked if Corwyn wanted to play ("It's a seven-player game") but he declined. So the participants were Brian, Kristen, Angie, Matt, Zee (actually also Brian, but going by Zee to avoid confusion with the other Brian). I think Brian was the central point of acquaintence in the group, with me being the one person who crashed the game without knowing anyone. (It is actually pretty awesome that one can successfully crash a game without knowing anyone at Tabletop).

 

After one game of 7 Wonders, we played two games of Cash & Guns, which is a fairly entertaining bluffing game. The basic theme is that the players are all gangsters after a bank heist, turning on each other to try to get the largest share of the loot. You get foam orange 'pistols' and use them to indicate who you're threatening each round. Most of your 'firing' cards are blanks, so there's a lot of bluff in the threats. The first game we played, I managed to win by a combination of luck and timing it so I'd be able to stay in when the pot was large.  The second game we included a 'traitor': in this case, a secret cop whose win condition was to call the police and survive to the last round. I was pretty sure who the cop was by the end (Zee), but the others did not believe me in time to stop him from winning.

 

We played a couple more games of 7 Wonders after that, while Corwyn got into a game with Fred & co. after the Urbanization game finished. The group I'd been playing with broke up around 9PM, and Corwyn and Fred had finished their second game by then, so I wandered over to see what was up next.  Fred and a man I hadn't met before, Steve, picked Castles of Burgundy.  Corwyn and I listened to the explanation of the rules with our now-familiar glazed expressions as we attempted to digest the meanings of symbols in a German worker-placement/resource-gathering game. This one had the addition of dice -- the rolls you made affected what options you could choose. It was pretty fun and very close -- the final scores for all four of us ranged from 184 to 193, IIRC. It was one of those games where I felt like I was lost and confused for most of the game, and yet somehow won anyway. Largely on the backs of my cows, I think.

 

Overall, a fun evening. I loved having the chance to play a bunch of short games. I'm thinking of buying a copy of 7 Wonders, though I don't know when I'd have the chance to play it with people who don't already own it. It is nice to have a game that plays well with seven people, though.