This week was an all time low in terms of numbers with illness, snow and work all conspiring to reduce attendance.  We knew we were going to be low on numbers, so we started out with a game of Tutto, to give anyone who might have been delayed by the weather time to arrive.  Tutto is a very short game with people drawing cards and rolling dice to score points.  If all six dice score, that’s “tutto” and you get a bonus as detailed on the card; if only some dice score, you can re-roll non-scoring dice, or stick and forfeit the bonus; if none of the dice rolled score, you lose everything from that round.  The game was amazingly tight, with the all players within a few hundred points of the 6000 target at the end.

With so few of us, we took the opportunity to play something very new and quite complex:  Vasco da Gama. This is a resource management game with an element of risk where players have to buy projects, recruit sailors, build, captain and launch ships and finally use them to open new commercial routes.  Points were slow coming in the early rounds and players’ scores remained close.  However, as time went on, it became clear that the position of ships in the navigation area was key and the player with the best positioned ships romped away to a clear victory.

Learning Outcome: Sailing is all about positioning your ship to make the best of the prevailing conditions.