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I went ahead and created an invitation for you and me and sooooo for both Stone Age and Speicherstadt as 3 player games. Egizia looks really complicated and I'm not sure I want to dive into it. Anything else we want? sooooo has the most experience of the three of us to suggest one?
(not meaning to leave you out Regoarrarr, we just wanted to try 3 player games, if you want a game too, feel free to set up an invite.)
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Well that was fast, the games started already. 
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T-Hawk: If you want to learn a new yucata game and don't fancy Egizia then take a look at the rules for Finca or Thurn and Taxis. They're fairly simple but they still allow for interesting play. Plus they're relatively quick games to play.
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I haven't been getting turn emails from Yucata over the last couple days, has anyone else or is it on my end somehow? Might need to check in manually.
Thurn and Taxis does look interesting, similar to Ticket to Ride as a route building game. I'd rather not jump on any new games right now though, I'm going to be in and out traveling for a couple weeks.
Stone Age will end this round if I have anything to say about it. Sorry Kylearan; those extra farms that sooooo and I got from those market cards early made a huge difference.
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T-hawk Wrote:I haven't been getting turn emails from Yucata over the last couple days, has anyone else or is it on my end somehow? Might need to check in manually. I got some, but also missed some. There seems to be a problem on their side.
Quote:Sorry Kylearan; those extra farms that sooooo and I got from those market cards early made a huge difference.
The extra farms were only one part of my problem - I also played awfully bad this time.  I wanted to try to "drill through" one stack of huts as quickly as possible without investing much in my "economy" (tools, meeples, multiplier cards etc.). The idea was that before your and sooooo's economy actions would start to pay back, the game should be over already. But with only 5 meeples it takes a lot more time to gather the necessary resources for the huts than I had hoped, so this didn't work at all and I had to abandon that idea mid-game. I had feared it wouldn't work, but wanted to try it anyway. 
There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better." - John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider
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Kylearan Wrote:I wanted to try to "drill through" one stack of huts as quickly as possible without investing much in my "economy" (tools, meeples, multiplier cards etc.). The idea was that before your and sooooo's economy actions would start to pay back, the game should be over already.
Yeah, I also read that "drill a hut stack" suggestion on Boardgamegeek, and yeah it doesn't seem to work that well. Our extra farms were part of the problem for you. With those farms, sooooo and I could make our extra meeples productive sooner instead of wasting them hunting while you drilled huts. And of course your actions had downstream effects: sooooo got all the farms and farm multipliers that you didn't invest in, and I got all the tools and tool multipliers.
I threw in a little spice to Stone Age by going for stone instead of brick this turn. After considering the tools, I need 8 pips out of the 5 meeples to be able to buy my hut. I did fail those odds once before. Can't possibly happen again, right?
As for Speicherstadt, I think I'm done with it after this game. It's just so cutthroat and aggressive. The best move like 90% of the time is simply to overbid another player's meeple regardless of what the card is. You win either way - either you force your victim to pay more for the card, or you get it cheap for yourself. You don't so much choose cards for good value (like Saint Petersburg or Dominion); more often the winning plays are to take whatever you can get for cheap by abusing the bidding mechanism. So you can't really focus on a strategy when you have to just take whatever comes to you. I think it would be more fun with a more traditional auction where each successive player places a higher bid.
That said, this game is still close. The bank came out very late, so it won't be a big swing, just 1 coin net by the end of the game if sooooo buys it for 2 now.
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It was a tough decision, but I actually went for the fireman over the bank. I don't think The Speicherstadt is one of my favourite games but I don't mind having a 4 or 5 player game of it running - with that number of players my turn doesn't come around that often and I normally remember what I was doing .
I was rather disappointed that T-Hawk took that ship card for 3. I think those early merchants that I usually ignore are paying off for you.
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The merchants are a gamble. They are paying off well for me in this game, but I have had a few other games where they go unused the entire time because they were for the same color cubes as my contracts. Merchants being useful really depends on whether you avoid that conflict, since you don't really choose your contracts much, you just take whatever you can get cheap. Never pay more than 1 for a merchant though. I also got lucky that several ships came with combinations of just my merchant colors so I could take them just to sell for profit (and to prevent my opponents from getting them. Kylearan is in real trouble trying to fill all those contracts.)
Thanks for the cheap bank!  But now I need to find something to spend the coins on, since I only need two more cubes for my contracts.
Your choice between the fireman and the bank really shows my point. Whichever one you would pay 2 for, I would get the other for just 1 coin because I covered your meeple on both. I didn't really care which just as long as it came cheap.
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Speicherstadt Final scores:
T-Hawk: 47 (runaway!)
Kylearan: 23
sooooo: 22
Scuppered on the last turn  .
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Yeah, I've never seen Speicherstadt snowball like that. Watching the replay, the key moments came in round 6. I could have bought a ship for 3 and a contract for 2 but I skipped both. With the extra coin for buying nothing in a round, that gave me a 5 to 1 to 2 advantage in coins, and in rounds 7 and 8 and 9 ships just kept coming with my merchant colors, which I could afford to pay 3 for each ship if necessary to just keep selling.
And yeah, those counting offices never work out. It's too easy for the other players to push you off them or for you to be caught short of money when one appears. Never pay more than 1 for the early ones. I took that last one just because there wasn't anything else useful to buy, not to scupper you, but it worked out that way. (BTW thanks Kylearan for staying up late to finish off the game.  )
The worst thing you can do is leave yourself with only one coin. Other players can push you off a card automatically by covering any meeple of yours. And even if you do manage to spend that one coin on something, you end up in the same situation next round. I cleaned up on cheap contracts (round 8) and firemen by taking advantage of opponents in that situation.
I think I've had enough of Yucata games for now. I've also played Stone Age a few times now on Brettspielwelt, and I really prefer a live session much more than taking a week or two for one game. Yucata doesn't work that well even for live games since it still takes several seconds for the page to refresh each time, plus people are always playing multiple games. We could try a session on BSW sometime if you like.
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