A new acquaintance

Yeah, I admit it, I had to google up the spelling on that word.

Anyway, today at Fantasiapelit, after finishing up the game of Smallworld, I got a chance to play completely new game to me.

It was 7 Wonders, and there were 6 players involved.

Though I was the newbie there, the game was pretty quick to learn enough so you could enjoy and play it without slowing everything down. Obviously my choices weren't the most optimised.

Anyway, 7 Wonders is a marvelously designed game. Pretty often you just won't find a game that can have, like we now had, 6 players, and be really fast and still yet involve all the players.

You get a random wonder that you must build during the games 3 "ages". You interact mostly with players that sit on your left and on your right so there's no time wasted on looking at the whole legion of players and finding the best course of action.

Yet everyone is dealt a hand of cards. You choose one of them and give the rest to a person either clockwise or counter-clockwise, depending on the age the timeline is currently in. This rotates until everyone has but one card, which is then discarded.

You get victory points from different buildings and working on your wonder. I got the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

I can't really analyse too much what happened there, but in the end I managed to finish my own wonder and had a huge military power. During first age I didn't understand how the combat worked so I got beaten up by both my neighbors. During second age I got still beaten up by one player, but won the other. And at last stage I won them both! Bwahahaha!

... yet I was last on the scoreboard.

I scored 42 points.

"Winner" scored 60 points. Actually two players scored 60 points so the tie-breaker needed to be checked from rules manual to determine the ultimate victor.