19-Feb-2008 All month   Oregon This game doesn't seem to have set the world alight, but Oggie liked it well enough to pick up a copy. This is a difficult game to describe approaches to play due to being very tactical. So I'm not going to try to give a blow by blow account of what everyone was doing. As you can see from the scores at the end, Steve was making the best job of whatever he was doing. I've seen more than one claim that the game has an enormous luck of the draw element. It is often the case that there are some clearly good plays which you either have the cards to take advantage of or don't. I didn't see anything during this game to give the lie to that claim. We saw scoring opportunities granting points in double figures, so clearly having the cards to take advantage of them makes a huge difference. I don't think, however, that the game will always go to whoever draws the most useful cards. There is scope for intelligent play and for making the best of whatever cards you do have. It may be a more interesting game if the hand size was increased from four to, say, six. This would certainly increase opportunities and flatten out some of the luck. However, this would come at the cost of many, many more options to evaluate. I suspect thus that a four card hand is a deliberate compromise to avoid the game slowing to a crawl.   Scores: Steve 93, Oggie 85, Andy 72, Paul 64 Ratings: Steve 8, Oggie 8, Andy 7, Paul 7 Winner(s): Steve