Wolfgang Kramer

Date: 05/12/2007 07:00PM
Location: Danny's house
Notes: Wolfgang Kramer ist ein deutscher Spieleautor. Oops, I mean, Wolfgang Kramer is a German game designer. One of the best. At this month's gamenight we'll be playing some of his award-winning games including Daytona 500, El Grande, Torres, Tikal, and Detroit-Cleveland Grand Prix. We'll also bring back of couple of the favorites from last month.

Report (also available at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/21610):

This month's theme was games designed by Wolfgang Kramer. Only five games made it to a table this month, three by Herr Kramer.

Nathan stopped by, but could only stay for a short time. So he and I played several games of Quoridor, a carryover from last month's 2-player night.

Seems this game generally comes down to one sweet move. It's a lot of fun making that move. I still like this one a lot.

No score, but I believe I won more than Nathan did.

When Nathan left, the Ben, Brian, Heath, and Danny had just finished their first turn of El Grande. They graciously, called a do-over and allowed me to sit in. We played a 6 turn game, and it was neck and neck until the last scoring round. Brian managed to put together some big numbers, and kicked it past the rest of us. He will now be referred to as "El Grande" for the rest of this report. Last time we played this he placed last ("el pequeño"). So nice turn around.

I clearly didn't think as hard as everyone else during this game. I was surprised that I kept of as well as I did, but in the end, I was el pequeño.

Everyone likes this game a lot and would like to play it more. El Grande got the nod for this month's carryover game, meaning it will make an appearance at the next two game nights.

Having not burned our brains enough, and with Ben leaving, we had the perfect number for Torres. Nobody at the table had played this more than once, so it was slow starting, but didn't take long for us to get rolling. Turn times ranged from 15 seconds to several minutes including a few "hold on, hold on, let me start over"s.

I think the others liked this one more than I did. If I'm going to have to think (analyze) this hard, I need a bit more theme than Torres offers to keep me interested. I never for one minute believed I was a leader of knights trying to build and jump around on castles or whatever the heck we were doing. I don't really know exactly what I'm doing thematically during El Grande either, taking over old Spain somehow, but I don't get bored playing El Grande like I do by the end of Torres.

That said, I won the game by a dozen or so points.

Nathan showed up about half way through Torres. Heath and Danny eventually set him up between them, playing a side game of Quoridor with Heath and Twixt with Danny.

I don't know how he did against Heath, so I'll call it even. I'm sure he got whooped up on by Danny.

Danny's brought his Twixt rating on li'l golem up to the 1700's. His copy sat in my attic for years before finding it's way to Danny. I'm glad it's found a good home.

Finished with Kramer's classic closer. Two hands sent the five of us through the deck once for a nice end of the evening. It went over well with those who hadn't played it before, and it was suggested that it get dropped in the El Grande box for next time. I won.

Believe that's it. We don't really keep track of such things. But if we did, the final tally would look something like this.

Matt (El Pequeño): 2
Ben: 0
Brain (El Grande): 1
Heath: .5
Nathan: .5
Danny (El Twixto): 1




4 Details El Grande
Danny Ferguson, Matt Sears, Ben Partin, Nathan Clark
3 Details Torres
Danny Ferguson, Matt Sears, Danny Ferguson
1 Details Category 5
Matt Sears
0 Details Quoridor