Monday 5th March 2007

Before Monday Night is Games Night Lisa and I enjoyed two quick hands of canasta. The first hand was pretty close. Lisa won it with 1010 points to my 560. This brought her total to 3155 and mine to 1710. In the next hand I went out really quickly due to picking up the deck at a good time! I scored only 975 points but forced Lisa to lose 190 points! (It's rare that I force her into a minus situation!). This put me back in the game with 2685 points to lisa's 2965.

Greg, Spencer and Vin then arrived and we set up Britannia. I played this once before and won (!) despite being fairly clueless about what I was doing. Still, it had been good fun. This is a 'sweep of history' game. Each of the four players represents several races who invade England sometime between the Roman occupation and the Norman invasion of 1066. The fortunes of the different races wax and wain roughly in accordance with history (although last time I managed to still have the Brigantes hanging around when the Normans turned up!). Every so often a race scores points depending on which regions they hold. Points are also scored for whacking the romans and killing opposition leaders - heroic figures who turn up occasionally.

As I had previously been victorious I was selected to play the Romans. This is quite hard as, although you have 4 subsequent races whereas everyone else has 4 in total, the Romans are your only really good one. Therefore you have to score most of your points early in the game and watch everyone else catch up and possibly overtake you later on. That said, I managed to amass 113 points with the Romans, which I think is quite good!

The Romans pretty much stayed out of Wales which allowed Spencer to consolidate his position there with the erm... Welsh! A little later and there was an epic struggle between the Angles and the Saxons for control of most of England. I did fairly well wresting control of most of Scotland from the Picts.

In the end we stopped playing at the end of Round 7; about halfway through. It had taken us 3 hours to get this far and we decided to conclude on another evening.

Scores thus far are:

Greg : 74
Spencer: 84
Paul: 143
Vin: 63

But we've got along way to go yet!