Wednesday, August 18, 2010

18.8.2010 - Friend's place - two smallworlds

Two three player Smallworlds today.

First game we had starting race combos: Forest Trolls (me), Merchant Humans and Wealthy Gypsies.

We played some rules a bit wrong for starters, but Gypsies sorted it out. After this game, being third game, I got all the rules right.

Anyway, game started weirdly, we all minded our own business pretty much. I took a nice spot of two forests, humans took a space far away from anyone and gypsies who started the game were just traveling here and there.

On following turns I started the aggression and mauled a bit humans, all the while protecting my precious forests.

Both gypsies and trolls beat the humans so they went into decline and new race emerged: Underworld Sorcerers.

Because such a race came into being and my trolls had taken a few casualties and couldn't really afford to keep two troop tokens guarding every space I decided to go in decline too and I got Berserk Kobolds. I figured that kobolds might be pretty good race actually, because we had to keep two tokens on every space anyway because of sorcerers.

Well, my kobolds really butchered half of the board and took a huge toll both on gypsies and sorcerers.

Gypsies went into decline of course. And we witnessed a terror combo. I just don't realise why I didn't see it coming... Were-Skeletons. And gypsy-player timed taking that race exactly so that he had the were-bonus on.

Butchering was huge and was only escalated by the fact that every two non-empty regions conquered added one skeleton... He got three new skeletons, meaning he conquered six non-empty regions. Insane.

Sorcerers went in decline too and emerged as Fortified Dwarves. Dwarves were far away from the action, and apparently I backed the heck off from self-replenishing were-skeletons... but I had lost too many tokens from my kobolds to be a real threat.

Lucky thing was that the horrible race/power combo of wereskeletons came so late in game that they didn't win everything.

Scores were: Forest Trolls/Berserk Kobolds: 84
Wealthy Gypsies/Wereskeletons: 79
Merchant Humans/Underworld Sorcerers/Fortified Dwarves: 70


Next game starting races:
Underworld Elves, Alchemist Amazons and Hill Halflings (me)

And at least we two other players started to really hate elves. You just don't want to attack them because they just come back... and because they were Underworld, they could almost jump to any place on the board. But on the hindsight, elves might be a better race when you got some other race in decline.

Anyway, elves were in the middle. I played halflings and conquered two hills that were next to each other first, thus gaining two areas that cannot be conquered by any means. Cool.

Well, Amazons conquered huge swathes of land during early first turns. Elves were also spread very thin so they didn't really do anything to amazons and my halflings were on the other side of the board.

Somehow amazons managed to do the amazing. In the end, when they went in decline, they had nine controlled regions. Nine! And next race/power combo she choosed was Historian Orcs.

Elves went in decline then and took Diplomatic White Ladies next. But the nasty thing was my halflings were faaaar away from in decline amazons. So no-one could do anything to that huge point deposit.

Then came the orcs and butchered my halflings to point of decline.

And in my small history of Smallworld that turn yielded the most staggering amount of points ever seen. Seventeen points. And next two turns gave her fourteen points, but I'm getting ahead in this story...

I chose Mounted Humans as my next race. I carved a really nice little empire of my own and was going to stalk orcs a bit, but they were unsporty fellows and didn't leave their areas undefended. Actually they abandoned many regions just to keep on killing in decline race tokens for bonus victory coins and usually didn't control more than four regions. So I chose to kill in decline amazons instead, but many of them were not in hills or farmland.

White Ladies were, suprisingly, very diplomatic with orcs. But in the end orcs had killed plenty of orcs and white ladies didn't really manage to conquer many regions. They went into decline pretty soon and came in as Berserk Tritons. The game was in it's finale anyway.

I spent last turns wiping out amazons but to no avail.

Scoreboard:
Alchemist Amazons/Historian Orcs: 123 or 127, don't remember which...
Hill Halflings/Mounted Humans 94
Underworld Elves/Diplomatic White Ladies/Berserk Tritons 63

... and next game will hopefully be played with Tales and Legends expansion.

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