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Well, okay, yes, it is a Cretan victory. I’m just bitter. 😉

The gang got together for a 5-player session of Advanced Civilization on Sunday. We’re getting more practiced at this, and got things going very smoothly. We drew for order to chose civs in, sat ourselves down, and had a very fast moving morning.

I got first choice, and decided upon Thrace, while Patch took Egypt, Dave took Babylon, Jason took Assyria, and Mark took Crete for lack of any position more enticing.

I did my normal job of abusing Thrace’s generous AST schedule and heading for Greece’s high concentration of city sites. Jason headed directly south with Assyria, while Dave maneuvered around him, leading to Assyria stretching from Lake Van to Palestine, with Babylon stretched 0ut around it from the east, to the north, and around into Anatolia. Mark’s Crete ended up primarily colonizing western Anatolia, jostling with Babylon, and my colony across the Bosphorus, with a small presence in Attica and Morea (we also ended up splitting Euboea).

I ended up with a very solid start as I got lucky in early trade card draws, and with a little dealing, got some solid 4 and 5-card sets, which allowed me to purchase three Civ cards at once, and then two more two turns later.

At this point I had a very solid lead, but as I pointed out at the time, having an obvious lead as we broke for lunch meant I was in for a miserable afternoon with the ‘biggest bulls eye’ award.

Well, it wasn’t miserable, as I never experienced quite as much destruction from disasters as I expected, but I had a hard time getting my feet under me again, and spent several turns stuck at four cities, which largely halted progress. Mark had largely caught up, and kept causing problems, with both of us stuck at the entry to the Early Iron Age (working on all those cards), while the rest of the table spent time stuck at the entry to the Late Bronze Age. We actually had to go back and sort out the AST at one point as we realized we’d been forgetting it after no one had moved for 2-3 turns, and every one was in Late Bronze now.

Mark had had a weak looking start as Crete, but benefited from Civil Wars in Egypt and Babylon, which gave him some foreign city sites that stayed up for a long time. (He got one city in the deep desert of Egypt, and then one near the Nile through Treachery, and Patch didn’t manage to get rid of the Cretan population and then the cities until after Mark got a couple from Babylon.) This did a lot to power him into a very solid second and start passing me by the end of the day.

By the time we had to pack up, I was still only at eight cards, and had muffed my trading on the last round and shut myself out getting any truly good deals. Though I might have been in a good position for the turn after, if there had been one. Mark, however, managed to pick up card 9, and finally passed into the Iron Age before we had to pick up for the day. In addition, I ended up with a Treachery from Patch that I couldn’t get rid of as I had traded myself into a corner.

Final Scores:

So, yet again, I placed second (7 out of 8 times now), though this time I had a fairly clear lead for a while. I do believe this is Mark’s first win in our group.

We’re thinking about trying to arrange a Saturday where we can go much later than the normal 5 PM and try to get to the final end of the game.