Dominion: Intrigue + Race for the Galaxy

We got our first chance to play the new Dominion expansion/stand-alone Intrigue tonight.  We used one of the suggested card selections from the rule book.  I can't remember the name, but it was the one that included lots of cards that had card drawing powers and extra action/buy powers.   As good as vanilla Dominion is, I wasn't expecting to like Dominion + Intrigue to a much greater degree.  Turns out I was wrong.  The new cards are awesome.  We had a close, tense game with Malorey edging out Jody and me 47 VP to 46 and 46.  Actually, after the first count, we thought it was a three way tie, but Malorey had missed a single VP card in her deck and squeaked out a win.  It was a great game and I expect that we will be playing many more games of this in the coming weeks.

 

Earlier in the evening we played a three-player game of Race for the Galaxy.  We are pretty much latecomers to this wonderful card game, but we are making up for it with two plays already this month and likely more to come soon.  I got ahead early in the consume powers department and pumped out produce and consume actions that benefitted me more than my opponents and they never seemed to catch up, but Jody had a huge military and was conquering huge points worth of worlds as I collected VP for consuming goods.  In the end, I managed to get to the end condition on exactly the turn I needed to.  One round later and Jody would have flown to the lead.

Final scores were Me-45, Jody-42, and Mal 35.  I really like this game.  We haven't tried the expansion yet.  I wonder how many games we should get in with the base game before adding in The Gathering Storm.

Anyway, two good games and the promise of playing Agricola next game night.  Woo Hoo!