Wound up playing not one but two games of Settlers last night with the Cities and Knights expansion. In general I do like that expansion (and far more than the Seafarers expansion), and I wound up doing fairly well in both games. I am starting to wonder if Settlers is getting "old", though: are there a limited number of working strategies, and they've all been exhausted?
Example: in the second game, I placed third. I looked at the initial board layout and concluded rock would be scarce (and in Cities and Knights, [a] cities are more important and [b] you need rock to build knights fairly regularly). So I built on the 4 and 11 of rock, with the first player having taken the only reasonable spot on the 8. Occasionally I found myself short on numbers, but then an 11 would come up and I'd get two rock, a money, and a clay. I also played fairly aggressively for cards. So even with a general lack of resources and no wheat, I managed to do fairly well, getting the only metropolis in game, based from what I can tell solely on the starting placement.
I wonder what the next big thing will be.
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baronet, I think, got a copy of Trans America, which is this cute communal 30-50 minute rail-building game. Carcassonne looked like it would be big for a while but never quite took off in our group. The ET crowd is going on this sudden Bridge push.
In the long-games crowd, there's some contention too. There are the people who think that Civilization is dead (fundamentally, your goal is to acquire 9 cities and then sit there the rest of game), but that didn't appear to stop organization for a new years' game. 18xx is sufficiently complex that it turns people off. Age of Renaissance seemed neat, and I think I have a little more of a grasp of the strategy now, but I've only played it once. *ponder*
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