Rowan Tree and Red Thread

We had alaimacerc[1] round last night for a spot of gaming, sammywol having finished her marking and in need of some unwinding. We decided on Tongiaki, a game tile-laying, island hopping in the Pacific, in which the object is get at least one of your boats on to as many, and as high scoring, islands as possible.

The tile placing rules make for some peculiar arrangements of islands, and this time was no different with a long chain of islands all connected and one poor little outlier across open ocean.

There was an initial mass migration off Tonga to the North (towards the couch) which I curbed by an early, and lucky, declaration of Tahiti as a royal island, after which most of the expansion was to the south, in a sequence of islands that formed a rough circle.

I pulled a couple of good, if cruel, landings that forced new migrations, using them as opportunities to push my opponents off high scoring islands, and this seemed to work for me. The final score was 36 to me, 26 to sammywol, and 16 to alaimacerc.

[1] Alaimacerc has requested that I use only his LJ name in the blog, in a roundabout sort of meandering way that couldn't be mistaken for any other enormously tall Scottish gamesplayer of our acquaintance.