A most excellent game night

[tigertoy]

Fred, one of my best friends from college, is in town for a few days, and he got some of us together for some games.  The centerpiece game for our old group was always Cosmic Encounter, so we were definitely planning on that, but we'd probably have time for some other stuff.  In the exchange of emails as we were setting it up, I asked Fred if he'd played Dominion and mentioned that it was my favorite game; I didn't actually own a copy but if we'd have people who would play it, I'd pick it up.  And then he sent me an email that said my copy was on the way, merry Christmas.  Which is really a nice thing to do.  I was worried that I might never see the package if I let the delivery service try to actually deliver it to my house, but I called FedEx and had them reroute it to the FedEx Office store in the neighborhood I was planning on being in, which worked out quite well.  We started a game of Dominion, but with 3 new players, we were only halfway in when the pizza arrived, so we paused to enjoy Papa Del's and conversation.  Wayne was able to drop by to join us for dinner and to share the tale of his tribulations dealing with his father's estate, but he couldn't stay to game.  So we finished the Dominion game.  Then we played CE, which went fairly quickly.  I had the Terrorist as one of my powers, and after we'd rehashed a game from decades ago when Jim had taken obscene glee in using the Silencer to shut me down every single turn, I put all my bombs in his system.  He had the Prophet and leapt to an early lead.  Fred surprised him by revealing Sting and taking two of his bases away, and he still came back to be tied for the lead with Doug, who used Judge to declare the winner got an extra base in the loser's system, and they both compromised and made a deal, so it looked like a double win, except that Jim's planets were all bombed, so Doug didn't actually get his base and Jim won.  Then we played a quick game of Kill Doctor Lucky, one of the few games Fred's wife Jennifer (who doesn't like games for the most part) will play.  I spent the whole game collecting weapons and not getting to be effective, but when I finally got a turn, I got Doctor Lucky alone in the sitting room and hit with the bad cream, and nobody had any failures left.  Then we played another game of Dominion, which is the real reason I needed to write this post, because I had the most epic turn I've ever seen played (at least with just the base game).  Key cards in the mix were Village, Library, Remodel, and Cellar.  I don't remember the exact sequence of the turn, but I played my whole deck, remodeled 3 Gold into 3 Provinces, and bought a fourth one.  It still ended up very close -- Fred bought the last Province to end the game before Jim could snag it (and he'd had the cards in hand to do it); had he gotten another turn he would have bought it and won, but he didn't and I did.

Anyone up for Dominion?

And thank you again, Fred.