Table for two

Image via WikipediaTuesday games met a bit of a setback to start with yesterday. It turned out that the "new" games table has had its legs removed and replaced so many times already that the threads have been stripped on the bolts that hold them in place. Nothing we did would persuade them to stay fixed to the table so we made plans for some more practical replacements and meanwhile retreated to the previous Tuesday games venue - the kitchen and it's somewhat smaller oblong table. The reason for abandoning the round drop leaf table we most often use for two-players these days is that we were playing Age of Empires III (aka Glenn Drover's Age of Empires: The Age of Discovery) and it has quite a large board.

 I was immediately taken by the look of the game in fact: The board is attractive and it comes with many colourful figures, big plastic coins and some nice trading ships.

More importantly though, it turns out to be a species of worker-placement game which is a mechanism I always seem to enjoy. This proved to be no exception and definitely had that can't-do-everything-I-want-to feel that paradoxically makes these games fun. It's a challenge to decide which of all the actions you would like to take will do you the most good and in which order to take them.


I seemed to be falling behind quite early on as Crabro had a healthy income and was even pirating some of mine. In the end, though, I won by quite a healthy margin and Crabro was keen to know how. I kept quiet and he appreciated that he would enjoy the challenge of coming up with a better strategy of his own.

What he didn't appreciate was that I didn't KNOW how I'd won. I'd simply taken what I thought were the best options each round given what was available and which specialists I had.

A very enjoyable, attractive and satisfying game and one I suspect we will play again, at least until Crabro gives me a trouncing. I think it will be a very different game with more players and we may find out tomorrow.

As we'd had a later start and a whole game to learn from scratch, it was well into the afternoon before we finished "Empires", in fact we had broken for lunch after the rules learning and before actually starting the game. We felt like finishing the day with some very light fun and after some debate and a look through the library Crabro requested another Fast Flowing Forest Fellers.

I was only too happy to agree and having set up a challenging course we set off...but it wasn't long before our "fellers" were going round in circles as the usual backstabbing and revenge cycles began. In the end the last of my lumbeeple crossed the line while Crabro's was trying to find a way through the final eddies, giving me my second win of the day. Very good fun. The table is a bit of a nuisance though. I have a temporary solution but it would seem that trestles are the way of the future.