Tuesday July 11th - Thurn und Taxis/The Bottle Imp

thurn
Originally uploaded by coljen.

Garry is back off hols so we are back to four, on the table Thurn und Taxis, the 2006 game from Andreas and Karen Seyfarth. We have played this once before and all thought it was pretty good. Hints of Ticket to Ride but that's a good game too so no problem there. Basically you are trying to complete routes for your postal service across europe. I covered the basic premise of the game in my May 9th post so I won't go over it again, I expect many of you have played it anyway. You do rely to a certain extent on what cards are showing on the display, I know you can clear the cards and draw 6 new ones, but uses your special action and you don't always want to do that. I got confused and thought that you didn't have to have a presence in Lodz to claim the chit for all colours and Richard was busy trying to keep his hand size down to 3 at all times. No, Richard, only when you claim a route :) This must have been hard for Richard as he likes to have fistfuls of cards at all times.
On the way to Garry's house Steve had said that he hoped Garry was going to choose Thurn und Taxis, ah, I said you obviously have a new strategy to try out. Well, I didn't figure out what it was but it showed in the final results with Richard narrowly beating Steve to first place. I was struggling to complete my final route when Richard ended the game by claiming the 7 route card. As an aside, I know the special action for clearing the board can be very useful if there is nothing useful to you, but it can be extremely frustrating for the subsequent players who have spent the last few minutes planning their next move based on the cards on the display!! Ah well, such is life!!!

Final Scores
Richard 29, Steve 22, Colin 15, Garry 9

We still had a bit of time left so Garry pulled out his bottle imp, well the clever little card game by Günter Cornett, I bought a copy at Essen 2003 and when we first played it Garry liked it and bought his own copy. In this game you play cards to the trick following suit if you can. The Bottle Imp starts off at a value of 19, if the winning card is higher than the value of the imp then that takes the trick. If any cards lower in value than the imp are played then the highest card under the value of the imp takes the trick and the Imp is then the value of the card that won the trick . Easy uh! Before the game you select three cards from your hand pass one left, one right and one goes under the Imp. The player who gets saddled with the Imp at the end of the hand takes the Imps trick and scores minus points to that value. Bit of brain burner for the first couple of hands .......and it doesn't get any easier :) Unfortunately Garry got caught with the Imp in all four hands that we played, and he still likes the game.

Final Scores after four hands
Richard 142, Steve 84, Colin 68, Garry -42