Sunday, July 27, 2008

Weekend Gaming

I'm stealing time at a computer at a hospital in Tzfat while my wife visits an old friend. More on our trip later.

Rachel, Nadine and I played Puerto Rico, which Rachel won with 63 to Nadine's 53 and my 50. I was second place with no corn up, which hurt, not only in terms of victory point losses, but in terms of limited building options (Factory was less of an option for me, for instance). Nadine built a Discretionary Hold when she should have built a Wharf, as she was concentrated in corn and ended up tossing a bunch.

Games I gave to the kids to play: R-Eco, For Sale, It's Alive, Set, and Apples to Apples: Jewish Edition. Only A2A was a big hit; they enjoyed the others, but not enough to ask to play more than once.

The kids also played Risk, Rat-a-Tat Cat, War, President, and other card games.

On Saturday night, Frances (an adult, not a gamer), Rachel, and I played Rummy 500. There are many different ways to play Rummy, but we ended up playing "Rachel's rules", which she revealed to us slowly as we played (on her assumption that everyone must already know the "right" rules to Rummy).

The rules were:
  • 7 card hands
  • meld sets as you go
  • aces are high or low
  • pick from deck, top card of discard pile, or entire discard pile
  • can add in front of you to other people's straights (or to their additions)
  • the round is over when someone goes out with no cards after a discard
  • from your played cards, aces net you 15 points, 10, J, Q, K net 10 points, all other cards net 5 points
  • cards left in your hand are subtracted from your score [so a card played is effectively double]

Francis went out most of the rounds, and was ahead for most of them, too, but in the last round I netted 195 points and ended up winning 325 to her 290 to Rachel's 220. Lots of other people sat around and watched us play.

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