Rules mistakes, games played.

OK, it turns out that I'm not the best rules reader. Someone else should really check me.

Traumfabrik: Reading more carefully, it seems that the extra indivisible amount of contracts ends up in the middle of the board, and not on each particular space. These extra contracts are added to and divided along with the next bid.

Geschenkt: The original rule was that the player who wins the bid starts bidding on the next card. We all seemed to think that this is a terrible idea, because if you take a card with no tokens, and you have no tokens, you must take all of the remaining cards in the game. Well someone on BGG pointed out the should-have-been-obvious to me: This is impossible. The first player to play has 11 tokens. Every time you take a card, if you weren't the one that flipped it, it must have at least one token on it. Ergo, you will always have at least one token to play.

Last Wed's session report on my website, as usual.

Thursday I played my usual 2 player PR with expansion buildings with my wife, Rachel. Some buildings are just included standard, now: Large Business (privilege of Captain and Builder) instead of Harbor; Small Wharf, or something equivalent, instead of Large Warehouse; Small Fashion District (sell indigo at +2), or equiv, instead of Construction Hut; also replacements for University and Office, whatever comes up. Very typical buildings include Large General Production Building (8/3, produce two of anything with corresponding plantations), Exchange House (swap barrels with Trading House at the ed of the Trader phase (a good answer to LGPB, but somewhat powerful in 2 player)), Surveyor's House (2/1 choose any plantation from supply, instead of turned up one), plus a few variant large buildings (vps for building types, or plantation types, of empty spaces or circles, etc...)

Shabbat I played.

- Traumfabrik twice, this time with the correct rules. The first time intruducing my daughter aged 11 and her friend and my mom to the game. They enjoyed it. The second time introducing my friend and several other guys in their teens. They also liked it.

- Anagrams, twice. Tough games, playing with my friend, who won the National Scrabble tournament, once. I lost the first game, closely, but won the second game even more closely (something like 49 to 47 tiles). While he has a ridiculously larger vocabulary for dumb words (like eau, aquae, and zoea), I am a hair quicker on the draw, better prepare myself for particular letters I am on the lookout for, and not bad at anagramming, myself.

- Dvonn. First time play, I was wondering if it would suffer from the same problem that I have with the games I tend to design, namely that there are so many choices that it seems random. Fortunately, while it did seem a little random, that was more because I had no idea what I was doing, rather than that I had too many choices. Nevertheless, any game where all pieces are essentially shared, is very hard to wrap your brain around. For the rules, see BGG.

We place our pieces, and I thought I was doing better since I had more pieces on the outside and therefore more liberty and choices. It didn't help, as gradually all of my pieces were either recaptured or simply removed from the board. I had a wipeout at the end, with no pieces left. Ugh.

- Torres. My friend tried it, and surprisingly to me, didn't really like it.

Yehuda