As I wasn't able to make it this week, Nige recorded the scores and Steve sent me the following report:

There were 5 of us tonight and the first game up was Notre Dame. It’s a game played by the Shrewsbury Boardgamers before and therefore doesn’t need a detailed explanation.

In this session we all started by immediately being worried by the 6 incoming rats. This caused one or two to start preventative measures very early. I on the other hand decided to brave it out and went for a strategy of acquiring more money and more influence cubes.

Mark K was quite quickly into a strategy of moving his stagecoach at every opportunity, this was helped by the person on his right (Guy) who decided not to move his stagecoach hardly at all and therefore passed on his stagecoach cards at each opportunity.

Nige (the game owner who had left the game set-up on the table for hours before-hand to work out the winning strategy) decided that money or resource cubes where not important and as long as he could keep acquiring victory points and by keeping the rats at bay would ultimately prevail. Sadly his lack of cubes and money resulted in Nige not troubling the score a number of times in the later stages.

Guy being the only newbie to the game struggled to balance the fine art of rat dispersal and victory point gathering and also suffered from not having enough cubes. Mark G on the other hand was quietly going about the business of getting victory points whilst keeping his rat population so low that he was able to cash in on that fact and gain points from the rat catcher (or what ever he’s called).

My money and cube management meant that I started raking in the points in the last few rounds of the game, at one point scoring 11pts in one go! Unfortunately it was not going to be enough as both Mark’s are in fine form on the hall of fame at the moment and it was a going to be a 2 horse race. Mark G had secured himself a huge amount of money but was unable to make full use of it in the Notre Dame Cathedral, whereas Mark K continued to tour the board in his stagecoach ringing the board dry of points and securing a fine win.