It was another quiet night as work intervened for many of us.  So first up was the “Feature Game”, Carcassonne.  This is one of the classic “modern” games where players lay tiles and play “Meeples” to score points.  Since the new gamers were unable to come, we played “nasty” rather “friendly”, with one player who kept getting road junctions and another who got all the got city ends!  It was a very close game that went twice round the scoring track and ended with only five points between first and last place.

The second game we decided to go with was Hamburgum which is a game set in Hamburg during the seventeenth century where players produce beer, sugar and cloth and sell them overseas. They compete for the best sites for their buildings and the best berths for their ships in the harbour, but ultimately they vie to make the most prestigious church donations, because only prestige decides the game. The game is almost completely luck free as it has no cards or dice and the actions are selected by your position on a carousel or roundel.

The game started quite slowly, until we realised we could build more than one building at a time, so, it took a while for the first church to be completed with all five donations.  The second was slightly quicker, but once we completed the third, the rest followed very quickly and the race round the roundel was on to get goods turned into money and then into resources to make the final donations to the prestigious last church. The margin of victory was much larger for this game than Carcassonne, but with about twenty-four points on that last church, the result could have been much closer.

Learning Outcome:  When it comes to resources, “few but often” sometimes goes further than “lots but rarely”.