IBG triumphs nine-nil in away leg victory

Contributors:  Noel, David

It was an away day at the Wharf last night due to the London Apprentice renovations. 9 of us were slowly toasted by the roaring fire and some lighter, gentler gaming options were on offer.
Medieval Academy was really good with 3, rattled along with everything changing on the last 2 moves when first Phil tied Noel, who had a healthy lead on the Dragon track until the last round, and then Paul tied both of them to take the 17 points, Noel going from gaining 17 points to 0 in two moves and rueing a passed Dragon 3, and Paul winning a great game from Phil:
Paul 34, Phil 32, Noel 25

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James II and I arrived early to find Paul A already there so we thought we would start the evening by playing something very light in Timeline: Inventions. It's not the greatest game ever made but it only takes ten minutes or so and there's some joy to be had knowing exact dates for certain cards such as James II playing the invention of Role Playing Games in 1973. After a few misplaced cards it soon came down to a shoot-out between Paul and I and I believe Paul won by correctly placing the invention of the Hot Air Balloon whereas I had misplaced the Steam Engine by a good few years. I'm sure the game would play better by mixing more versions together such as Film and Music. 

After that both Andy and Raj turned up so we moved onto a game of Murder of Crows. The objective is still spell out the word murder in front of you whilst preventing others from doing so. Each card has a letter from a pool of M, U, R, D, E, R with a part of a story on each card. Each letter also has an action so by playing M allows you to steal a card from another persons murder and so on. The first person to spell murder wins and then reads out the story they have created. Raj won with his murder involving someone being bludgeoned to death with a frozen turkey or something.
When everyone else arrived we split into tables of three and I settled down for a game of Medici with Andy and James II. James and I were novices having not played before but it was simple enough to pick up. James overpaid on the second round and crippled himself to such an extent it was too much to come back from even though he hit quite a few of the higher bonuses. Andy was successfully waiting towards the end to win valuable bids at a low cost and rack up quite the lead whereas I was somewhere in-between. By the time it had ended Andy had a comfortable 144 to my 115 and James' 85 or thereabouts. I really enjoyed this one and would like to have another stab at it sometime.
We followed that up with another Knizia auction game with Palazzo. This time Andy was the novice as James and I had played it a few times recently. The objective is to construct the grandest palace with the most windows using the same type of material to score the most points. We were all concentrating on constructing our own palace rather than foil the others which lead to all three of us building rather grand palaces. I unfortunately made the fatal flaw of running out of time before scrapping my negative point palace as James and Andy gleefully ended the game. It ended with James on 38, myself on 33 and Andy on 29. I did have the satisfaction of building the perfect palace so there was that.