Settlers went really quickly. The other guys struggled getting the right numbers together and I ran away with it. Stone Age is probably still my favorite of the Settlers games.
Carcassone: I exchanged the lead with one of the two other players for most of the game with the third player lagging 10-15 points behind throughout. However, the player I was jousting with got too aggressive trying to block out a really lucrative city and instead helped the straggler complete the damn thing, to the tune of about 35 points. Up until that happened I had the game locked up but after that city scored even the 32-point net I got from farm couldn't catch me up quite enough. She ended up winning by 6 points. Blargh.
Fleet Captains: This was our first game of this. We quit after about four turns. So far I'm feeling decidedly undecided about the whole experience.
I'd read there is a lot of luck in the game but I was not prepared for how much really depends on the luck of the draw. There are an amazing number of variables from the combinations of encounter cards, map creation, command cards, fleet composition, and dice rolls that I can imagine no two games ever playing exactly the same. However, everything is so heavily luck-driven that I could see you losing games outright just because some of those variables come together to screw you over in one way or another (ex. your side of the map doesn't jive well with your fleet composition, your encounters consistently sucked, etc). In our game, by the end of turn 4 my opponent led 7-1 and we hadn't had a single combat. Up until that point I'd drawn two encounters, one which caused me to disable a ship's subsystem until it could be repaired and the other which caused another ship I had nearly at the map's midpoint to be thrown back to the starting area. Meanwhile, my opponent drew two encounters, both positive. Additionally, my buddy was able to complete two big sensor test missions back-to-back, one for 30 and the other for 20, scoring 5 vp without ever having to venture beyond the hexes two spaces from his starting point. What allowed this: map and fleet composition were aligned perfectly, with two nebulae in his first two rows and two sensor-dedicated ships in his fleet. Meanwhile I was hitting the engines hard just trying to get him my ships into close enough range that I MIGHT pull off a combat attack or two before the game ended. At least the ability to discard mission and command cards gives you a chance to somewhat mitigate the luck of the draw. I'm hoping future plays will give us a better idea of how to manipulate the luck factor a bit as games of this weight that are also heavily luck-dependent don't usually hold my interest for long.
Especially if it's a link to something you wrote on a subject that is relevant to the thread you posted in. Personally, I'm glad you do as I like reading reviews before I buy a game or after the fact to see what others think.
