A Couple Games

Last night I played one game each of Pandemic and Dominion on BrettSpielWelt.

The Mrs., Tom, and I played Pandemic on the heroic difficulty setting, and through finding two cures and eradicating Blumonia the game seemed to be well in hand. All of a sudden a nasty chain reaction was started that took us from two outbreaks to eight and ended the game. Black Plague was in an advanced state, with several cities infected with two disease cubes each. However, we were not making it our top priority since there were also two cities on the board with three cubes, albeit in slightly less dangerous areas. When an epidemic was drawn and Cairo picked as the new city to receive the Black Plague, Cairo came up as the first city on the newly shuffled infection deck, and Black exploded into a six outbreak disaster area.

Here's the question: the turn before we had flown to Santiago to remove a three cube Yellow Fever threat. Was that the right move, or should we have been lessening Black's influence even though there were no three cube cities there? Does one generally dangerous area warrant more attention that an isolated three cube city? Or perhaps Cairo being drawn in that situation was simple terrible luck and we made the right decision. I'm still not sure.

Tom and I played Dominion next and I tried an aggressive Chapel strategy, buying it my first turn and proceeding to weed out all of my estates and coppers. I then proceeded to buy silver, gold, a Market, and a Laboratory or two. The first several times I had the opportunity to buy a province I declined, choosing gold on each occasion instead. The Mrs. laughed at this decision, saying it was foolish and that I should be getting those provinces. Its' possible I waited a little to long to start buying VP cards, but I'm not sure. I did end up winning 29-24, but perhaps I could have won by a greater margin. There is a real sense of power in trashing all those seemingly good cards to make a very condensed and powerful deck. I'll have to try this one again and see if moving to province purchase a bit earlier works out better.