So, after last week’s session, I bought Rattus and the Pied Piper expansion. This order and some other additions finally got me to 250 games owned, so now I have the silver collector geekbadge at Geek. Hooray! Now I can sell stuff again… Heh. A big auction coming up, later in the summer, so I’ll save my selling there.

But, Rattus. We ended up playing two games yesterday, using random character cards, but with all six different categories present. The 12 new characters from the Pied Piper expansion are fun, and in my view the expansion is mandatory. There was no question of buy or not, it was a must-buy with the base game.

I did well, again, winning both games (I believe; my notes are flaky and I won’t trust my memory on this). My general strategy of avoiding character tiles and not being afraid of rats seems to work. The character tiles are very good and offer solid benefits, but when you have them, you take much more damage from the rats. Tuomo spent our second game holding three tiles most of the time and boy did he hurt. I take a second tile, if I have a decent reason to believe someone will take one from me real soon.

Rattus is pretty high on my list of entertaining fillers right now, and the box is fairly backpack-friendly, too, so I think it’ll get a lot more play before this year is over.

And hey, this time I can present you a photo of our game. This was our first game, with the bishop and the Emperor from the expansion quite visibly on board (love the Fortress Hungary there), I’m playing red and in this game I shared the victory with yellow despite my at the moment weak presence on board, that much I remember for sure.

After Rattus, it was time for Black Friday, again. This time with correct rules, I… believe. Ok, had to check the special actions from the rules as I wrote this and turns out we had it almost correct — we still had the special actions little wrong, but that’s fairly minor.

Still, the game worked without problems and we had a good game. It was very close, too, with scores of 16, 16, 16, 15 and 10 (ok, so he was new and everybody else had played before). I ended up third, having lost the tiebreaker.

We’ve played Black Friday on three weeks in a row, that’s something rare. I’m going to take a bit of a break now, but I wouldn’t mind playing the game more, just later. However, when I play the game, I’d like to give it a go with just three or four players. We’ve now played every game with five players, which I think is at least one player too much. Sure, it works, but I believe I’d prefer the game with fewer players.