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April 07, 2003

Games: Acquire

Played Acquire on Friday in a very unhappy game. I think this was the first time I have played with 3 and wonder if what happened is a common experience with this number. I was pretty well positioned in a lot of the
mergable chains after the initial buying period (before the first merger). However, the first chains merged were the only ones I had nothing in and after that no mergers happened for a good while, during which time the other two players spent their bonus money to make it so my position was much worse. In addition, I only drew one at all useful merger tile really the whole game and could only get 2nd place out of it. I was thus way behind and had no way to catch up but had to sit around for the rest of the game. In addition, my turns, even when buying stock, always took seconds (as I had planned my purchases in advance) while one player was extremely slow, taking probably 3-5 minutes per turn. All in all, this was excruciating and I took to going over to watch another game between turns which isn't that appropriate but I had nothing to do and time between turns was way long. The one chain which I had a full majority in and which started the game as the most central of all the chains ended up being the 3rd to last merger. For a large portion of the game, this two tile chain (with 6 neighboring spots) had 5 merge points.

Very unenjoyable game and I wonder if Acquire regularly has this problem with 3? If players were playing quickly, it wouldn't have been that big a deal but at the pace of the slow player, sitting around was excruciating.

Posted by aarondf at April 7, 2003 02:11 PM

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