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February 27, 2006

St Petersburg Mistress Revisited

Discussed this before but have been playing this a number of times again recently due to the expansion. Also, I had planned to try to not play again with possible Mistresses (of Ceremonies) on turn 1 but the expansion has changed my mind a bit on it. Some of the expansion cards are also very unbalanced so tweaks for better balance seem less sensible when playing with them. I would still prefer to change the rule but don't feel as strongly about it when using the expansion.

However, I played two games on Thursday and in both games there were first turn Mistresses and the player who got it won. In the first game, there were 3 experienced players and a a newbie (call them ABCD with B being the newbie and A had first Orange choice in round 1). Only two blues were taken as C decided not to open a space for himself and so I as D had to follow suit. Thus only two orange cards came out - an advantage for A but as long as they weren't great not too big a deal. However, a Mistress and a Black Market came out so it turned out that not only did A get a Mistress but he was the ONLY player to get an Orange at all in round 1 - an incredible start and one I don't think I have ever seen before. He made a significant mistake on the last turn that made the game close but still won, leading the whole way.

In the second game, I not only got a Mistress on T1 but an Observatory on T2 (only one that came up) and won the game running away, ending up ahead by like 25 points. Also had a funny moment on the last turn. We were in the Green phase and someone asked about the go 1st card (expansion card in Upgrades deck) and Matt said it hadn't come up yet and was thus useless. I commented that no, that wasn't necessarily true. I in theory could use my Obs to take an upgrade card in the Blue phase, get this card, and then use it in the Upgrade phase (was already going first in Orange phase). Amazingly, this is exactly what I did and what happened and let me get an 8th noble using a Black Market and upgrade it by being able to go first and grab the only Orange upgrade. Would have won easily without it but was pretty amusing.

Posted by aarondf at February 27, 2006 11:46 AM

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