Last night’s game of Stone Age was fraught with ooooh’s and aaaah’s, @#&*$’s and %$@(#’s. That last part was mostly from Owen. But before I get to that, Mike the younger joined us to replace Evil Mike. Evil Mike fell down the stairs. No, I didn’t push him and, as the surveillance cameras clearly show, I was nowhere near him at the time. But still the investigation continues. Hopefully Mike will be back with us next week…unless another completely random tragedy befalls him.
Mike the younger (we call him this to distinguish him from Evil Mike and because he is, relatively speaking, young) is a very good game player. Whenever he plays against us he usually ends up winning or close to it. Tonight was no exception. This was his first time playing Stone Age, while the rest of us had played it a few times. After Ben explained the rules and then Owen corrected Ben’s explanation, we started the game.
What to say about Owen? Owen had a terrible, horrible, no good kind of game. There were no tears, although I think he was close to it. His dice rolling was worse than I’ve ever seen it. Going first in this game is usually a good thing. When it was Owen’s turn to go first, the board really sucked so there was nothing for him to take advantage of. And to make matters worse, towards the end of the game, he made a huge blunder…that we would not let him redo. Owen did have a plan though and he scored tons of points during the game. I should point out that it’s at the end of the game that most of the points are usually scored. But that’s the great thing about this game; there are many strategies to get points. Ben played a good game, but was far behind everyone in points during the game—far, far behind. He was banking on a bunch of points at the end. Mike just played a good, solid game and I thought he would end up being the winner. He too made a blunder near the end of the game when he misunderstood the payment for a particular hut card. This could have cost him the game. Me, I had a mediocre game. I had average points on the board and knew I’d get an average number of points at the finish.
So how did it turn out? Owen did respectably well even with his horrible bad luck the entire game. Ben scored around 150 points at the end of the game. A tremendous number, but it was not enough to overcome his in-game deficit. Mike and I ended up tying with around 190 points each. During the game, I had thought about the unlikelihood of ties in this type of game. Shows what I know. Mike came out on top in the tie breaker and was declared the winner.