One of our regulars is moving pastures new, so as this was probably her last week, we played games she said she liked.  We started off with Parade, which is a little card game with an Alice in Wonderland theme where you add cards to a row, but the cards that you place dictate what cards you pick up.  In general, cards score their face value and the object of the game is to have the lowest score, however, for the person who has the most of a colour, that colour scores only one for each card. So, the game starts with everyone trying to minimise what they pick up and then, once the writing is on the wall, everyone scrabbles to pick up as more cards than everyone else.  We first played it a few weeks ago and our leaver came second by just one point, so this had an element of a re-match.  The winner from last time was quickly forced out of the running and ended up with twenty-eight points, and the battle was between our leaver and the player who came last in the previous game.  Sadly, our leaver once again finished in second place with twenty points after being forced to pick up a couple of tens, but, with fourteen points, the win went to someone who claims he always looses “little games”.

Next we started setting up the “Feature Game” which was Keyflower with the Farmers expansion and then a couple more people arrived.  Keyflower is one of our most played games, but there is one player who usually wins, so the rest of us made a point of ensuring that Green didn’t have it all his own way this time.   Like the last time we played with the expansion, we used all the farming tiles.  Winter tiles were doled out and the rules were passed round as people checked and double checked what they had.  Spring tiles were then revealed and Red and Blue went for the sheep tiles.  Red and White won them, but Blue had placed a couple of workers on the tiles before the end of the round giving her a breeding pair.  By the end of the summer both Red and Blue had a large flock of sheep and it was only then that Blue dissolved into fits of giggles as she realised that sheep weren’t pink and she had been collecting the wrong animal…

Meanwhile, Green had been acquiring resources, Yellow had been trading tiles getting two for one on each occasion, and White had been busy building up a healthy stock of green meeples and pigs.  In the last round, the winter tiles were revealed.  The Hillside tile came out and it suddenly became apparent why Green had such a strange shaped village, so Yellow took it off him.  The only other animal tile that came out was the cow tile which Blue made a play for to try to redeem her earlier spell of colour blindness.  Red pointed out a couple of turns in that it was worth a lot and promptly started to bid for it too.  In revenge for “stealing” his Hillside, Green took the Scribe which rewards players for collections of skill tiles, so Yellow took the Windmill which rewards players for collecting resources…

Despite Red’s efforts, Blue managed to sneak under the radar and nabbed the Keythedral (which is worth twelve points).  The collective efforts of Yellow, White and Red had succeeded in preventing Green from winning.  However, despite having a chronic shortage of meeples throughout (due to squandering them on sheep in the first two seasons) and therefore a very small village, and almost no points from anything else, the combination of a heard of cows, the Keythedral and the damage the other players had done to each other, meant Blue finished with seventy-one points, seven ahead of Yellow in second and twelve ahead of Red in her last, quite epic game with us.

Learning Outcome:  Beef is very nourishing!