Three on Thursday

Several members of the group being absent, three of us settled down to give the new mini-civ Roll Through the Ages another try. mrwendal had not played before but took no time to get up to speed and won the first game convincingly. I trailed in a poor last having struggled for manpower and therefore extra dice. One of the nice things about this neat little game is its portability, with goods and food being tracked on a small wooden peg board and everything else indicated by filling boxes or ringing items in pencil on the score-sheet. This score-sheet doubles as a player aid, tracking developments owned, number of dice/cities and monuments built while also showing turn event order and game end criteria. The second game was comparatively low-scoring, at least partly owing to the hits taken from disasters, as we all seemed to decide not to protect against drought etc. I finished the game off with a fifth development but without much hope with 12 points against me from pestilence and other evils, to find that I had just scraped the win with all scores in the twenties.
The second game of the evening was 11 Nimmt. I thought I knew what to expect from this having played a number of games of 6 Nimmt but the game play of its new sibling seems significantly different. 6 was never one of my favourite games despite my lifelong love of having cards in my hand. I found I enjoyed 11 though and felt I played reasonably competitively despite taking a different approach to the other two. Both mrwendal and crabro freely took piles of more than three cards into their hands to give them the advantage of the bull cards (allowing them to place more than one card at a time). This did look like the way to go: "Going backwards to move forwards" in the words of mrwendal, however I stubbornly continued to place single cards and not pick up any as far as was possible. Over the three rounds I almost never had a bull card and never placed more than one card at a time. The object of the game being to rid yourself of all your hand cards the end result seemed surprisingly similar with mrwendal and myself only one point apart. The very clear winner though was crabro who managed to score not a single negative point over the whole three rounds.