I just played four two-player games of St. Petersburg at Brettspielwelt. Longest game took almost 14 minutes, fastest was over under eight minutes! That’s more like it!

I managed to win only one game. In two-player games it’s easy to see when one player starts to get more and more workers and then you can say it’s already over. Of course, income gained in other phases will balance it a bit, but usually you use the worker money to get the other income. Two games were such obvious cases today — I won one, lost the other. The other two games were closer. In one of them, the game was tied before the aristocrat bonuses. Very close, then, unfortunately I had two aristocrats less than my opponent.

Moritz Eggert wrote an article he humbly titled A winning strategy for St. Petersburg. Looks interesting — the strategy is focused on acquiring upgrades — but as could be expected, Alex Rockwell and Jim Campbell tear the strategy down. Interesting. Alex Rockwell has only 15 games of St. Pete at BSW, that’s surprisingly little. Not much more at the Geek, either. Still, he seems to know what he’s talking about. In the other hand, Eggert at least plays with the people who’ve written the massive German St. Pete analysis.

Who knows, the strategy seems interesting but I’m not swaying from mine (which is probably pretty close to what Alex Rockwell is doing). I usually do pretty well, today I noticed I made some mistakes so there’s some room for development. But hey, at least I notice when I make a bad move — now I’ll just have to figure out how to see all the mistakes before I do them.

St. Petersburg is a bit tricky game — a good player will beat newbies hands down, even with the crucial strategy lessons (well, a lesson: buy every worker you can, unless you’re you won’t make profit). If all players are good, luck of the draw will decide the winner. Or would, if nobody made mistakes and most people do, so I suppose that’s what makes the game work.