Busted by blue bacillus

Kathy and I tried a two-player session of Pandemic on Tuesday afternoon.  This was, I think, our fourth or fifth game, and we're definitely still getting the hang of strategy in keeping the diseases under control.  Our first two games were two- and four-player Introductory games, which we won easily enough.  I think we won our first two-player Normal game as well.  We started to think the game was a little too easy - until we lost our first three-player Normal game a few weeks ago.

Blue outbreaks overwhelm our feeble
efforts to control the disease.

Well, our suspicions that this game really isn't as easy as it looks were confirmed.  In our latest effort, Kathy's Dispatcher and my Scientist were foiled despite our early discoveries of cures of the red and yellow diseases.  While we scrambled through southwestern Asia and Europe to treat the black and blue diseases, consecutive outbreaks in Toronto and Chicago consumed the entire supply of blue cubes and ended the game in defeat for the Centers of Disease Control (CDC).

Pandemic really is a fun game, and the nice thing is that our kids will sometimes join us as well.  I think this will become something of a family favorite.

Latest on the Eagerly Awaited Game

My publisher tells me that they are awaiting delivery of the mapboards, the last component to assemble my Eagerly Awaited Game.  I haven't heard a peep about marketing other than the intent to release the game at the Origins Game Fair if they get the boards in time.  They don't want to kick off the website until they know they're ready to deliver, so we'll see what the actual release date is.  Once it's out, I intend to make sure everybody knows about it!

Two-player Wonders

My wife and I have finally got the hang of the two-player rules for 7 Wonders, currently my favorite game to play.  We played a session this afternoon, right around the time we made the transition from iced tea and iced coffee to wine and beer.

Kathy had the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus ('B' side), and I had the Statue of Zeus ('A' side).  Interestingly, Kathy spent nearly all six turns in the first age acquiring different resource-producing structures, largely because the Mausoleum demands a lot of variety to build the three stages.  I started early with a military strategy, which worked for the first age, but Kathy responded with two military cards in the second age, and stayed ahead of me thereafter.

Kathy's impressive array of
blue civil structures at the foot
of her wine glass

My fallback was going to be the blue civil buildings, but she raced ahead of me in those as well, in large part because she had such a variety of resource production as well as the benefit at each stage of her wonder of getting a free building out of the discard pile.  She was very aggressive about building blue civil high-point buildings - and keeping them out of my hands - as well as completing a set of three green technologies.  With all of that, she completely overcame the Mausoleum 'B' side's disadvantage of low point potential and beat me 58 points to 51.