Our first Friday games session for about 6 weeks, I think, and it was a good ‘un. When I emailed a reminder, I said I wanted to play something fairly meaty – and 5 was a great number. When they arrived, I had Princes of Florence, Caylus, Agricola and Das Zepter von Zavandor on the table. For once, we managed to start play by around 8.15 instead of closer to 8pm. (Note to self: Do this again. I used to try to have a couple of games out, then stopped for no particular reason).

We started with Agricola (severalth game for V; second (and first with cards) for D and J).  This game played very weirdly – there was a surplus of food early on, then a scarcity (I even took my first ever begging card!)

My cards pointed me strongly towards stone – and made it easy for me to get stone – but I neglected the rest of my farm (to my cost). Bastardry from my fellow players ensured that I only managed to Bake when I *bought* my oven and never later.

We all played really badly. Everyone was slow to get any sort of resource production happening, and we squabbled over trivialities like the Starting player space. It was a bit of a mess – although of course we all had fun.

J dominated the game – she put us all to shame with her enormous farmyard and squillion or so VPs and Bonus points from her cards. I think her score was 40, followed by 30, 25, 24 and 23.

D and J were done by now (it was a long game – closer to 3 hours than the 2 I usually expect) so V, Fraser and I broke out Princes of Florence. Fraser beat me by about 5 points, something like 62 to 57. I had a bit of a catch-22:  pay a lot (1100-1200) for Jesters and have them, or let the guys win them for less. As usual, I bid up the Jesters. In retrospect, I would have been better to take a couple of Recruiter cards than my fourth Jester – although it and a very convenient bonus card did help me all the way to a whopping 32 point work. I think I won a moral victory by playing that 😉