That’s what we’ve been hoping for… a break from the rain.  Don’t get me wrong, I love winter storms on the coast but we’ve been itching to get outside to do some non-rainy activities.  Looks like things might get better today as we could actually see the sunrise and it is looking like we’ll see some scattered showers but no continuous rain.   The boys and I plan to play some basketball outdoors this morning after breakfast, and we have a low tide mid afternoon so it’s a perfect opportunity to drive down the coast and visit the Yaquina Head tide pools.

Yesterday was full of rain and wind so we stayed indoors most of the day.  We did see the latest Harry Potter movie and had quite a good time.  Very good effects and a good treatment of the story.  Now I feel caught up enough to read the latest two books.  One complaint – Emma Watson as Hermione.  Was she intentionally over-acting to portray the high drama of an adolescent teenage girl, or is she just having troubles acting?

Before dinner last night we got in a few games of For Sale (thanks Yehuda for the last-minute recommendation to bring this out).  David has spent a career in real estate so I thought this would be a good fit.  He and Jan picked up on the rules quickly and had fun playing I think – this is definitely my favorite filler and intro game.

We might also try and fit in a game of Railroad Tycoon today in between b-ball and the tide pools.  The boys are anxious to play Duel of Ages again but having lugged RR Tycoon out here I’d like to see it hit the table at least once.

I worked a half day on Wednesday and we hit the road by about 2pm, arriving at the coast around 4pm.  Surprisingly, we beat Jan and David here by about 30 minutes; they spent a decent amount of time shopping in the midst of their drive from PDX to the coast.

Last night the boys and I took a stab at Duel of Ages.  I picked this one up from Doug and I thought it might hit a sweet spot with the boys.  There are a few fiddly rules that we didn’t get right until our second play today, but overall it was easy to dive right in and play.  Matthew and I took on Jacob with four characters on a team.  The luck went Jacob’s way for the first 2/3 of the game and it looked like Jacob would run away with a victory.  The dice started rolling our way and Matthew and I made an amazing comeback (we were down 3–1 I think), partly due to an ill-advised attack by Jacob which allowed us to tie the game just before time ran out.  We entered sudden death and Matthew and I were able to advance one of our guardians to pull out the victory.  The boys (and I) came away from the game eager to play again, and we were able to get in another play today with David.

Before that play we tried a 6–player game of Pickomino (aka Heckmeck Am Bratwurmeck), a game Julie chose and brought home from Essen.  This is a fun little press-your-luck dice and collection game that has a nice amount of take-that and we found to be quite enjoyable.

This afternoon we played 2v2 Duel of Ages with David and Matthew defeating Jacob and me soundly.  We fixed a few of our mis-played rules this time around – we weren’t doing separate rolls for damage, instead using the attack roll to also determine damage.  Our fun didn’t diminish at all in the second playing so now I suspect I’ll need to anxiously go out and get all of the expansions.  Where should I start?

Julie and Jan once again prepared a tasty Thanksgiving turkey with great side dishes.  Extremely well timed as well, as we sat down just as half-time for the Cowboy game started.  You’d think they had been trained by the Boni Maroni.

Jacob was checking out the weather outside to see if it was still raining, and noticed a salamander sitting in the pine needles just outside the window.  He decided to venture out to bring him in out of the cold – he was quite sluggish as you might expect. Matthew of course had to wear it.

Here he is on Jacob’s hand.

Tomorrow afternoon we’ll load up the car and drive out to the coast for Thanksgiving weekend, which we’ll spend with Jan and David.  We’ll be sure to get some gaming in, so it is time to decide what to load up in the crate.  We have a decent selection of party games out there already, but I’m hoping to get in a few meatier games.  Here’s what I’m thinking:

• Railroad Tycoon – the kids are loving this one as am I, and I think it will be an easy sell to get David to play this one.
• Time’s Up – a rematch!  Maybe we’ll switch teams up this time, as Julie and I won handily last time.
• Lost Valley – I managed a few plays at BGG.CON but the boys haven’t played it yet and I think they’ll love it.
• Cribbage – Jacob’s been enjoying this one lately so why not run with it for a while?
• Drive – Curious to see how this plays with four players.

Probably not worth trying to bring Indonesia, Antike, Caylus, or Byzantium though I’d love to play any of these over the weekend.  Hmmm… Matthew did love Caylus, maybe I should reconsider.

I wish I had a decent football boardgame to bring out during the Cowboys game on Thursday.  I’ve heard good things about Pizza Box Football but haven’t tried it yet.

Any other suggestions?

KC, Rita, and I held a Havoc launch event at our friendly local game store, Rainy Day Games.  We did this on Sunday to kick off National Games Week.  Turnout was, well, “meh” but we did have non-stop demos going on and it was fun to just hang out with friends (the Rudes, Loops, Deans’s’s).

We did a drawing at the end and give away a gift card for RDG and a copy of Havoc with all of the expansions.  Steve Ellis, owner / manager of RDG, is such a nice guy and we always have great conversations about game industry trends, distribution, game store profitability, and more.

Ken, Brandon, and Jacob played some CribbGolf, a game I picked up at Goodwill earlier this year for $1.99.  As Ken put it, “this is a great way to ruin cribbage.”  Oh well… maybe I spent too much.

Steve showed a few of us how to play Tsuro, the new abstract release from WizKids.  The production on this game is very nice, and the play isn’t too bad either.  It reminds me a bit of Metro but it plays quickly and should be a big hit for these guys.

What’s amazing is the price-point on this game – about $25.  Just goes to show how volume production can get the cost (and price) down on what looks to be a high quality game.

Football season for Jacob and Matthew ended this Saturday as Jacob’s team lost in their championship bid against a tough Canby team 6–0.  The only touchdown was a defensive score off of a fumble – this was a tough defensive battle!  Jacob did a great job this year on the line, playing offensive center and tackle and a number of different line positions on defense.  Matthew also had a great year, playing fullback and scoring over five touchdowns and putting in some great play at cornerback.  He’ll be playing again at the same level next year so should be a dominant force at running back.

One of my only purchases at BGG.CON was the new Eagle Games release Railroad Tycoon.  I held off on purchasing Age of Steam once I knew this was coming out, as I believed it would be a better fit for my family given the production style of Eagle Games.  Jacob and I played a prototype demo at GenCon last summer.

Friday was a holiday for all of us, so we broke out the game for a 3–player session at home.  The game was easy to setup and teach and we were off and running within 20 minutes.  I was especially pleased with how easy it was for Matthew to grasp the mechanics of the game.

We started off with a battle over the northeastern links, and I managed to get the best return on investment there and jumped into the lead.  Getting hotels in Boston and Baltimore didn’t hurt.

Jacob was the first to try a new area, building around Louisville and starting to accumulate some nice links there.  We took notice of the number of empty cities and I realized we were close to finishing the game after only an hour of play.  This was not good for me as I was behind Matthew in total number of links, and I knew that I needed my Tycoon bonus to beat Jacob.  Unfortunately Matthew’s bonus entailed building links out of Chicago so he wasn’t slowing down his track construction any time soon, making it impossible for me to catch up.  I tried to bluff Jacob out of ending the game quickly, but he wisely ignored me and forced the ending, pulling out a four point victory.  Very satisfying game for all of us, and I was especially impressed with the short 75 minute playing time for our first game.

The three of us along with Ken and Brandon trekked over to Tim and Carrie’s place for some Saturday evening gaming.  I brought several of my new games, including RR Tycoon, Caylus, Antike, and Wits and Wagers (Eagle Games was kind enough to send me a review copy of the game).

I set up Ken, Brandon, Jacob, Tim and Doug for Railroad Tycoon.  Again, the game was easy to teach and they were off and running without much more assistance from me.  Tim pulled out a narrow victory over Ken, and impressions all around the table were positive.

I give Eagle Games a B+ on the bits.  The empty city markers are a bit gratuitous, and one of them doesn’t even fit in a hex.

Meanwhile, I taught Doug, Matthew, and Carrie how to play Caylus.  Caylus takes a while to teach – plan on 20 minutes or so, but it clicks quickly once you start playing.  I warned everyone that they would likely make a sequencing error at some point in the game (e.g., not having the right resources at the right time when the buildings activate), but of course everyone did fine in this area but me.

Matthew focused on generating lots of cash early in the game.  Eventually I reminded him that he’ll need to generate prestige at some point, so he switched gears to castle building and did quite well.  I pulled out a narrow victory over Matthew, with Doug and Carrie a short distance back from him.  Caylus is the kind of game where you need at least one play to start formulating any sort of strategy, so it wasn’t surprising that I won.  Most surprising was how well Matthew did.

We wrapped up the evening with a game of Wits and Wagers.  This is a trivia game where all of the answers are numeric, positive numbers.  A question is read and each player writes on a little dry erase board an answer (e.g., how tall in feet is the Empire State Building?); players have 30 seconds to answer.  The answers are arranged smallest to largest on the betting mat.  Players then have the opportunity (again, for 30 seconds) to place up to 2 bets on the answers.  The bets that are further away from the median answer will have a bigger payoff.

This is a very light trivia game, but is reasonably forgiving to those that don’t know trivia.  There are opportunities to guess and get big payoffs, but in the end I think the more you know the better you’ll do.  Tim finished in first place with Matthew and I (team) a close second.  This will get some more play over Thanksgiving weekend and I’ll post more thoughts then.

This will be my final report on BGG.CON.

 We started the morning with a game of Alhambra down in the plaza courtyard (apropos, yes?).  This was a six-player match with KC, Rita, Jim, Jill, and Yehuda.  Sadly, I left my CF card in the laptop and didn’t get any snapshots.  This game is a fun pastime but I’m still mostly convinced it is a luckfest.  I specialized in just a few colors and did fairly well, but couldn’t manage to build a decent wall.  Rita came out ahead by a single point over me for the victory.

KC took another stab at Yehuda’s prototype, which was nice as he was able to get some rules clarifications.  We’ll be giving this one another player over the next few weeks to make sure we give it a fair evaluation.

Mark Johnson and I were finally able to hook up for our pre-arranged playing of Verräter.  Mark did an all-about podcast on this game a while back and it sparked my interest enough to pick up a copy at Essen.  The rules aren’t trivial for this game so I figured this would be a good chance to learn it from an expert.

The game didn’t disappoint – very deep for a seemingly light cardgame.  I can see now how this game has likely influenced a few others (Puerto Rico and Citadels come to mind).  I did horribly but had fun and look forward to trying it with my group.

As the convention started winding down, Ed and Susan wandered over to our booth and I talked them into trying Northwest Trek, one of KC’s prototypes.  This is a very light game that allows for conversation so it was nice to just relax and chat with them.  It is a shame we live so far apart because I think our families have a lot in common and that our kids would hit it off.  Maybe we’ll see them at Gulf Games in the future…

Around noon all of the vendors started packing up their goods for the return trip.  Havoc is easily transported in our luggage… the other vendors boxed up their goods for shipment.

Our flight wasn’t until 7:30pm, so we hung out in the plaza with Kevin Nunn to try out another of his prototypes.  This one is a deeper boardgame that has some real promise and we’ll be taking a closer look at it over the next few weeks.

BGG.CON is a great convention and I think it will get better (and bigger) in the coming years.  The community is so self-selecting that I suspect it has the feel of some of the more prominent exclusive invitations without being, well exclusive.  Great job Derk and Aldie and I hope you outdo yourselves next year.  We plan on returning.

Note: For those of you that have been following the Flickr photo set for BGG.CON, please note that my camera’s date/time was off by about 12 hours (forward), so some of the dates taken are wrong on the photos.  Sorry.  The camera is fixed so things should be fine going forward.

I let KC and Rita sleep in on Saturday morning and took over booth duties during and after the flea market.  My reaction to the flea market was “eh” but several folks found some good deals.  I know Jim picked up a much wanted copy of Battle Cry that should be good fun with his kids.

Around 11am I taught and played in one of my few scheduled events of the weekend – Antike.  Joining me were sedgtroll,  Edbryan, JosephDowell, and sbabcock.

Antike is a relatively light-weight euro-style conquest game.  It does involve conflict between nations (I don’t think you can win this game without attacking) so is technically a wargame, though it clearly isn’t a simulation.  Players take on the role of civilizations.  There are multiple paths to victory as players compete to earn historical figure cards for accomplishments like having 5 (or 10, or 15) cities, destroying other players’ temples, being the first to acquire a certain kind of know-how, or for building temples.

On a player’s turn, a player chooses between 1 of 3 types of actions – produce, build, or maneuver.  The way actions are chosen is, to my knowledge, a unique mechanic in Antike.  There is a wheel on the board where each player places a colored marker indicating their chosen action.  At the start of the game, each player chooses any of the available actions.  Thereafter, you must advance your marker around the wheel clockwise from 1 to 8 spaces to choose your next action.  Advancing 1–3 spaces costs nothing; each space beyond that costs 1 resource per space.  This is significant because the related production / consumption activities are always 4 spaces away.  So if you want to produce marble one turn, then build a temple (which requires marble) the next turn, you’ll have to pay an extra resource to choose that action.  Same thing if you want to maneuver two turns in a row.  This encourages players to pace themselves and work on a diverse set of activities, such as producing gold one turn, expanding their armies the next turn, then increasing know-how on the third (which uses the gold produced two turns ago).  You can see the rondell in the upper left corner of the image:

What I love about this game is that there’s very little downtime for players (though it does increase throughout the game) and it plays easily in under two hours.  The game board comes with two distinct maps, with the player aids on one side in English and the other side in German.  This gives owners of the game two different maps to play, which is a nice bonus.  Definitely consider Antike if you are looking for a short duration, low downtime conquest game.

I talked Eric Hautemont into trying out Havoc mid day on Saturday.  I think he enjoyed it quite a bit and he did buy a copy.  Thanks to Jill for serving as our demo monkey on Saturday.

KC spent some more time with the Beatnik Turtle folks and taught them Basecamp Delta, one of his prototypes that he recently submitted for the Hippodice competition.

More on this later, but I did finally get some time on Sunday to play games with Ed and Susan as well as Mark Johnson.  I managed to get a snapshot of Ed, Greg Wilzbach, and Mark Johnson playing the yet-to-be-released Mission: Planète Rouge with Asmodée Editions.

On Saturday night they held the Texas Hold ‘Em tournament.  I got taken out fairly early while trying to stupidly complete a flush draw.  Rita did very well and ended up taking the seat I vacated shortly after I “went home”.

I was eager to get some rest Saturday night so I opted out of late-night gaming.  I did help Jim, Jill, KC, and Rita get going in their Hoity Toity game, teaching them the rules and explaining in depth why I detest the game.  I think they had the same impression, stopping the game 2 or 3 turns into it.

Hard to keep up on these reports with so little sleep.  I’ll try and catch up and give a brief report on how Friday went.

I finally got to play one of the bigger games on Friday, helping teach and lead a session of the new Splotter release Indonesia.  Peter Drayton, his wife Julie DuBois, Todd Walker, and Jeff Wu joined me.

It took about an hour to teach everyone the game, and I’m certain we made a few mistakes in the early goings.  Most notably, we let players build more than one city each in the first era – the rules are ambiguous in this area.  There’s a clarification on the geek that makes it clear that only once city per player will start each year.  This is important because cities grow when they get fully supplied with goods, and more cities means more competition for goods which means slower city growth.  I don’t think it affected our enjoyment of the game.

This is an economic game where players operate companies trying to generate profits through the sale and shipping of different types of goods (rice, spice, rubber, oil, TV dinners) to cities.  Mergers can be proposed allowing for consolidation of companies, with payoffs to the merged company owners.  This results in cash distribution similar to Acquire, though there is a key difference: players don’t get to cash out their companies at the end of the game, and the victory is determined by cash on hand.  So most money will be gained through operating revenue. 

The game could have been a lot more fiddly and less streamlined than it is – I suspect the designers spent a lot of time taking out unnecessary complexity.  It took us 3–4 hours to play the game, but I suspect it can easily be played in 2–3 hours.  It seems to be close to Caylus in length, maybe a tad longer.

I won the game but it was very experimental; Peter proposed a merger that threw me the game.  Final scores where 1022 (Chris), 830 (Jeff), 821 (Julie), 604 (Peter), 469 (Todd).

On Friday we started hanging out a lot with Jim Ginn and his wife Jill (I first met Jim and his three sons at GenCon, where they played with Jacob and Matthew).  Their company has made the conference much more enjoyable (and it would have been a blast even without them).  Also, on Friday evening we had the pleasure of hanging out and dining with the Beatnik Turtle dudes.  Very nice folks and they are rightly Cub fans and not Sox fans.

After dinner I watched and snapped some photos of Peter Sarrett’s famous game show.  Even as a software guy I was very impressed with the system he’s put together for this game show.

Attendees self organized into teams of four (Aldie and his team are below) to play through three rounds of challenges – mostly trivia combined with arrangement of visual clues.

Here’s an example:

The four clues above where shown in a 2x2 grid, numbered 1–4.  Players are required to organize the numbers in order to sound out the phrase (or clue indicated by a phrase).  Teams are self policing and Peter quickly tallies who correctly finds each answer.  I only stayed for about 20 minutes – the clues were pretty tough and a number of teams got frustrated early on and left.  Very well run and organized, if a bit crowded.

The final game of the night was a game of Caylus that Jim, Jill, Rita, KC, and I started at about 12:30am (!).  Sterling Babcock was desperate to play this game, so Jill very kindly stepped aside and let him join in.  KC clearly learned from his mistakes in our first game, slingshotting to a huge lead at the end with a strong castle building strategy.  I went for residence / prestige buildings and did well enough to finish second, but still well behind (at least 15–20 points) KC.  I don’t think I like the game as much with 4 (3 or 4 are preferred, haven’t tried 2 yet), but it is still A-list for me right now.

Got back to the hotel room at about 3am and had to be back on the floor by 9am.  Ugh… at least I was able to let KC and Rita sleep in and get some well deserved rest.  They’ve booked more time in the booth than I and they earned a break.

It’s late but there’s always time for a quick post with some photos and game comments.  Probably more photos than comments today.  Reminder: you can follow my photostream on Flickr to see photos throughout the day, plus extras that don’t show up on the weblog.

After a quick workout and some breakfast in the morning, we headed over to the south tower, level 5, to check out the facilities.  Derk and Aldie were actively engaged finalizing details, trying to find chairs, and handling general logistics concerns.  I think they were most worried about getting chairs.

We setup our Havoc demonstration area in about an hour or less. KC and Rita did most of the work… in fact they probably did 90% of the work for the whole day.  I’ll make it up tomorrow.  By about noon we were giving our first Havoc demos.

 Yehuda arrived about this time as well and spent some time sorting out some game materials.

I bet Eagle Games, Z-Man Games, and Days of Wonder were all thrilled to be located close to the Sunriver Games booth – I’m sure the Havoc draw will bring a lot of traffic to their lesser known games.  I told Eric and Mark (below) that they are welcome to try and sell me any of their games but that, unfortunately, I already own all of them so there’s really no use.  Eric decided I needed to buy a 2006 calendar.

Derk and Aldie did an amazing thing – they setup three prize tables with an instant raffle upon badge pickup.  I drew the lowest valued ticked (red) but picked up Plunder, a game I’ve been wanting to try for some time.  AMAZING how much they can fit in that small box.

A bit after noon a couple (Numskull and BilboAtBagEnd) of gamers stopped by the Z-Man Games booth and asked to play their only copy of Siena. I overheard the request, asked if I could join in, and we headed over to the open gaming area.  Gilby and EdBryan joined us so we were set with five players (gilby, edbryan, numskull, and bilbo in order left to right below).

The games was incredibly difficult to read, learn, and teach on the spot.  I wish I had read this before trying to digest the English rules.  The game is good, maybe excellent, but unfortunately I ran out of time and had to bail out before ending.  Players take on the role of peasants that move up to be merchants and finally bankers.  There are some creative mechanics in the game, but I’m not sure how they all fit together.  I didn’t get to observe enough of the final banking phase to see how that played out.  Oh, and there are prostitutes in the game.  Seriously.  And they entice your banker to join them in the inn.  And you can distract them with girlfriends.  This lead to some interesting color commentary during our play.

The game is well produced with some very nice artwork.  I’ll probably pick up a copy of the game once it ships.

I then taught Antike to two groups, but did not play myself.  I’ll get a chance to play it on Saturday and will let you know what I think.  General impression was that it is a solid conflict / empire game with very little player downtime.

After dinner at an Irish pub with Rita, Jeff DeBoer, and Baldboy_1, we returned to have Jeff teach KC, Rita, and me Lost Valley.  This is an exploration game I picked up at Essen for a mere 10 euro based on a recommendation from Ben Corliss.  I’m glad I did, because this is a great game.

Players take on the role of explorers trying to find glory through gold panning and mining.  There’s an exploration / flip the tile element to the game, but the fun is in the resource management and dealing with other players’ actions.  KC played a superb game and wiped us clean, finishing with something like 28 points to my 15, with Rita and Jeff tied at 12.  Wasn’t even close, but it was still fun.

Tomorrow we’ll sell some more Havoc and I hope to get in a playing of Indonesia.  I also hope to pick up a copy of Railroad Tycoon – Eagle Games thinks they’ll have stock by the morning.  I just need to make sure we sell enough Havoc to make room for it in my bag!

I had no idea this was (finally) about to be released.  And to think I considered picking up Knife of Dreams this week… tisk tisk, I should know better.

Hopefully George R. R. Martin knows how to finish a story.  I have faith.

KC, Rita, and I safely arrived in Dallas tonight for BGG.CON.  This will probably be our last convention to exhibit until Essen next year, and our goal is to play games as much as we sell Havoc.  I’m scheduled to play at least Antike and Indonesia this weekend.  Also hoping to get in at least one game with Mark Johnson and I need to spend some time with my friend Yehuda from Israel. 

(I may add photos more frequently than I blog.  You can follow the photostream on Flickr to see cool pics as I upload them.)

We had a brief lay-over in Denver on our way to Dallas so I brought out Gloom.  I bought this because of the cool see-through card mechanism and the mostly positive review over at Have Games Will Travel.  We also like to sample print quality, and I noticed that the game was made in India – I suspect PlayingCardsIndia manufactured the cards but I could be wrong.

We only got a single turn into the game,  but I think we understand how to play.  Simple game with a great theme: inflict as much misery on your family before delivering untimely deaths to them all.

We are very unimpressed with the quality of the box and the cards.  Much of the text is unreadable, the cards show creases and streaks right out of the box, and it seems like the game is unlikely to last for more than 10 plays or so.  Apparently some folks on the geek agree with this assessment.  Now I’m not saying we could do better – this has to be a difficult design and production challenge.  I just wish the end result looked better.  Maybe we’ll get a chance to play through it tomorrow.

The hotel here is very nice, other than the fact that we got stuck with smoking rooms.  They ionized the air pretty well and I can’t detect a trace of smoke in the room.  So I guess we are a step ahead of Essen.  Here’s the view from my room.

Tomorrow morning we’ll setup our meager Havoc display at around 11am in anticipation of the vendor area opening at 1pm.  I’ll be teaching a group how to play Antike around 4pm and hope to get in a good amount of gaming tomorrow night.  We also have a batch of prototypes from KC and others to try out each evening at 7pm.

I forgot to post a link to this cool article in the Sherwood Gazette (our local small-town rag) about Havoc.

It was my turn to host a Rip City game night.  My travel schedule has forced me to bow out of several of the last events and have someone else host in my place, so it was nice to finally have things work out.  We had a decent crowd of seven tonight.

Ken showed up a bit early so he, Matthew, and I tried out a round of Drive, the card game from SimplyFun for 2–4 players.  I never seem to get to play a full game of this because I’m always on my way to somewhere or something else.  It is a fun, easy to learn, light card game that seems to work just as well with 2 or 3 players.  Haven’t tried it with four yet.

Matthew fed me too many nice cards so I managed to win the hand easily.  Ken says he’d rather sit to the left of Matthew next game.

The rest of the crowd starting arriving promptly at 7pm.  Caylus was the universal choice for tonight, so Mike brought along his copy so we could run two games concurrently.  We opted to squeeze both games onto our dining room table to allow Mike and I to teach it together to everyone.  Well, I taught it verbally while Mike mimicked my sample plays and pantomimed some of the verbal commentary.  Quite amusing.

I mentioned before that I enjoyed Caylus but had some concerns about a runaway leader problem.  I felt much better about this playing, partly because I won (!), but mostly because I’m beginning to think the game justly rewards solid play.  I was much more prepared in this game and I think my adaptive strategy paid off.  Jim struggled with the rules, while George played a solid game and would likely give me a much better fight in a second playing.

I tried to play contrarian, avoiding the castle when I suspected others would go there and getting some early buildings out.  Going to the castle when you can build at least two sections seems to be a great way to economize on turns (I managed to build three at once in the second scoring phase).  I only made one minor planning error in the game – you’ve got to pay attention to your resources and plot out your move.  This becomes especially important as the number of options grows.

We started the instruction around 7:20pm and the game at 7:50 or 7:55pm.  We finished about 10:15pm.  I think with experienced players, a 3–4 player game should always finish in less than 2 hours.  Both games finished within 2 minutes of each other.  Ben apparently pulled out the victory in the other game.