Pasta night!

[torkell]

Today's game of choice (as decided by the super-high-tech paper-based voting app) was an epic 6-way Settlers of Catan game, with the Helpers of Catan expansion. The Helpers expansion adds an interesting dynamic to it - the helper abilities can be surprisingly powerful. Hilde (steal 1 resource from a player with more victory points), Jean (trade any resource with the bank at 2:1), and Marianne (claim a free resource if you didn't get any on your turn) all were very handy and generally stayed in people's hands, while Paddy got lumbered with Louis (move a road for free) which isn't particularly useful and he struggled to play that ability. I started with Candamir (substitute 1 resource when buying a Development Card, plus pick the card of your choice from the top three) who has the potential to be powerful, assuming that the top three cards aren't all Knights!

Louise was the surprise winner of the game through sheer quantity of settlements and cities. She got hemmed in by Paddy and I think Matt and so didn't have much space to build out, but it turned out that there was exactly enough space to place four cities and a couple more settlements for the win. It helped that she got a good supply of stone and wheat (9 and 6 were the lucky dice rolls in this game - 7 was surprisingly rare). I got up to eight points in the final round but couldn't manage the final couple of points.

Oh yes - there was also more SCIENCE BREAD with the other tiger bread baton that we froze last week. I tried garlic granules today with Stork spread, parsley and cheese. Verdict was again mostly successful though the bread hadn't quite defrosted and needed quite a bit more time in the oven than we expected. Plus the garlic spread mix was rather uneven, as Sarah found it when she discovered a very garlicky bit! We ended up discussing other possible fillings - I wonder if a hint of chilli would work?

Comments

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the Helpers of Catan recommendation. It's not my favourite game, but it has the advantages of, A, being shorter than most of our other games, and, B, being fairly easy to teach to newbies, so we do play it every now and then. This looks like a nice way to add an extra twist to it, so I've just added it to a Christmas order I was about to commit.