You know how when you play Sudoku, and you get to that point where you know you’ve turned the corner, you’ve broken the puzzle wide open, and all that’s really left to do is fill in those last twenty squares? And it takes another ten minutes and it’s kind of tedious work, a grind to be honest, it’s no longer a challenge or crafty mental exercise, it’s clean-up? But you do it anyway, because there’s that sense of completeness that needs to be fulfilled, it has to be done to count, even if all the good parts are over?

Well, some board game sessions end up like that, too. And if one person alone isn’t smart enough to pull himself away from a Sudoku puzzle that’s as good as done, what do you think the odds are that a group of players can do it in a board game? Not good, that’s the answer. Sometimes we think it’s still fun to see how close the finish might be, even when the “best” moments of the game are done; or maybe we hope for one more kick or dramatic turn in the homestretch (that seldom comes); or maybe we’re conditioned to play it all the way through to be good sports. Usually it’s the guy in 2nd place who feels this way, not the guy in 4th place.

An admission of a guilty habit: sometimes we play for speed; I’ll put a premium on blasting through a game if it means we end up with time for another. I like fast play anyway, it’s more tense and exciting, though it’s not suitable for some games – or some players, for that matter. I try to limit my bad behavior in these cases.

But last night three of us got together and had about three and a half hours, and pushed to play three games instead of two. Even with this premium on time we took each one to the bitter end. Here’s how it played out:

First up, Thurn & Taxis, about the fourth time we played. A fast game once you know how to play. Sometimes I bust on a game for its random elements, but I respect in T&T how the randomness does a good job countering analysis paralysis. You figure it out the best you can and let it fly. I won this game, score of 25 to 25 to 19; most folks would call this a tie, but T&T provides an explicit tie-breaking mechanism, which I suppose is nice for tournaments or wagers (???), but pretty well useless for friendly play. I’d call it a tie. This was a sloppy finish! If I hung in there a few more turns I would’ve likely gotten up to 30 points, more than my opponents would have gone up, so it would have looked like a more convincing win. But I figured “good enough”, ended the game, and squeaked in. Is this good or bad play? I don’t know. I meant well and it was accepted as such in this particular session.

Next up was Tigris & Euphrates. We choose these two games ahead of time, by the way: T&T because of the novelty, and T&E because we had played it just a few weeks ago and still remembered the rules (most of them, anyway) and decided we might even learn something about strategy if we played it again! Well, strategy is hard in T&E because the board state can change so abruptly. I tried a specific plan, though: spend the first half of the game getting mostly just two colors, including some sort of monument, and then the second half of the game concentrating on the remaining two colors. I don’t know if that’s a good plan or not, but it worked like a charm this time out! I got a lot of my first two colors, and when “invaders” came and blew me out of my nice sprawl of tiles, I didn’t waste energy fighting back. Rather I caused a meltdown in a part of the board that was new to me and moved in where I could get my other two colors. Oh man, those external conflicts are still enormously difficult to plan correctly! And I ended up with a pretty convincing win for my troubles, something like 12 to 7 to 6. The other two players expressed a lot of frustration over the course of this game.

Along the way, I came up with a new rule of thumb for T&E. I think you get about twenty turns on average, at least with three players. And you get two actions per turn. So if you can, on average, churn out one scoring token per action, and you manage to balance your colors, you can shoot for having ten of each color by game’s end, which would be a pretty strong showing. You can’t really get a point with each play, but monuments are a vital aid, and winning conflicts can bring points by the handful, so it might be on the mark overall. I will see if this rule holds true or not in future games. If it does, it would make a useful gauge for where you stand mid-game…

One player pointed out before we played that while all points earned in T&E are kept hidden, they are all earned publicly, and so you could play with “public” money rather than make it a memory game. If we had done this I probably would have taken more direct assaults later in the game; neither other play realized just how far ahead I had pulled.

So the last game of the night was “loser’s choice”, accommodating a bit of table talk en route to a decision. We considered Acquire and Puerto Rico and Ra but ended up going with Settlers of Catan, Cities & Knights. This one is always a tough call for our gang – I love the simplicity and relative shortness of the basic game, and C&K always seems to end up a confusing slog at the end by comparison. But it been ages since we’ve done it, so why not? C&K ended up taking almost as much time to play as the previous two games! And to complete the night’s trifecta, I won fairly handily. With some significant luck, of course: I based my starting laydown on the numbers 4 and 8, and a ton of each got rolled, while 5, 6, and 9 all languished. It was pretty brutal. I powered out to a huge lead but it wasn’t a total runaway in the end. Before my eventual last turn, the player before me had a somewhat credible chance of trying to get 3 points for the win, but couldn’t. As per my recollections, this game gets slower the deeper you get into it, with handfuls of all sorts of cards and a bedeviling array of frustratingly unavailable choices. This would have been a good game to call after the first hour, and I don’t know whether the closer-than-expected finish proves anything one way or another.

Meanwhile, I’m basking in the glory of my little winning streak!