Attendees: Dan Carey, Michael Feinberg, Jim Halloran, Alex Jordan, David Knoyle, and Dave Olson

Games Played:
1) While waiting for more people to show up, Michael and Dave started off with Innovation. Early on, Michael was able to set up a scoring/achieving engine through the use of gunpowder and took the first five age achievements and seemed like he would run away with the game. Dave got combustion though and quickly stole all of the score back and took the age six through eight achievements and had plenty of score to pick up his fourth (the age 9). Michael however had been accumulating deep stacks of cards and once he was able to find some dogma effects to splay them, had more than three of each type of symbol, allowing him to claim the empire achievement, which was the sixth needed for him to win.

2) Dan, David, and Dave spent the bulk of the day playing GMT’s Andean Abyss. Dan was the government player, in charge of the police and army.  Dave K. played two sides, the AUC (right wing paramilitary) and the drug cartels.  Dave O. was the FARC, the Marxist guerillas.  The game started off with all building up their forces.  For most of the first third of the game, Dan’s population was in the 40’s, short of his victory condition of 60.  Dave K.’s cartels, which want to make money and stay out of the way, were not doing well and ran low on resources.  His AUC forces slowly built strength and amassed quite a bit of resources.  Dave O’s FARC got all of their units out on the board and built up their strength.
In the second third of the game, with Pastrana as president, Dave O’s FARC was able to establish some zones were he was safe from Dan’s government forces.  However, Dan’s army and police kept after Dave’s guerillas outside of those areas, holding the initiative by forcing them to stay on the run.  Dan did not build up much popular support but Dave O., did not do much to take any away.  Dave K’s AUC was able to get most of their bases out, but did not out number the FARC, the AUC victory condition.  The cartels started to amass more resources.
In the last part of the game, Uribe was elected president, so the FARC no longer had safe zones.  However, the FARC holed up in a few departments and was able to stave off any possible government assault.  Dan then went after the AUC, which were growing strong.  That knocked them down a bit.  He was also able to drive the cartels out of Cali, improving his popular support.  Otherwise the cartels amasses an immense amount of resources and were flirting meeting their victory conditions (>10 bases, >40 resources).  Dave O., and Dan took steps to eliminate some of the cartel bases to prevent a victory.
The end of the game came six cards from the bottom of the stack.  No one won the game out right.  Dan was able to increase his popular support some though.  With the tie breaker rules, Dave K., won, as his AUC and cartels were closest to their victory conditions, just ahead of Dan.  Dave O.’s FARC came in third.  Overall the game took five hours.

3) Michael, Jim, and Alex played Lords of Waterdeep. It was a close game, but getting the lieutenant (and it’s extra worker) as one of Michael’s starting quests gave him the advantage he needed to win with 112 points to Jim’s 106 and Alex’s 104.

4) Michael, Jim, and Alex moved on to 7 Wonders with the Leaders expansion. On totaling up the score, it looked like Alex had won with his 66 points from a fairly diverse strategy, but upon checking the math, Michael just edged him out with 68 points, mostly from three full sets of science (48 points).

5) Moving on to something more cooperative, Michael, Jim, and Alex played Pandemic at the normal five epidemic difficulty level. The epidemics seemed stacked to the top of the deck, but they managed to quickly sunset red, giving them some breathing room. Blue was also then sunset and it looked like they might run away with the game when outbreaks in the Middle East and Africa pushed the game to the brink. Cards were in hand to cure yellow and black but pretty much any yellow card coming up would have caused two more outbreaks and a lost game. Luckily, the cards were kind and the diseases were cured, just before another epidemic card would have been drawn.

6,7) Michael, Jim, and Alex then played two games of Settlers of Catan. The first game was fairly balanced with everyone around 6 or 7 points, when Michael was able to steal Alex’s longest road which combined with a point from a development card got Michael to 10 points and the win. The second game had an odd map set up, where Michael, despite being first player and getting last pick of locations, was able to get an almost perfect settlement selection with all resource types in high probability mid numbers. The dice were definitely in his favor, bringing in large quantities of lumber and bricks, allowing a huge road network to divide up the board in his favor and he ran away with the game in a quick victory.

8) Michael, Jim, Alex and Dave finished up with Love Letter, where Jim was most effective in getting his notes to the princess.