Game 4This is the sort of game I dread. There's King's Court, some reasonable actions and a reasonably fast KC-free strategy. First you have to decide whether or not KC will be useful, and if you decide that it is, you're then thrown on the mercy of the shuffle until you connect KC with something good.
Ed was worried about my Border Village/Hunting Party, and I think he's right to be: the Village is doing very little for me here when I'm KC'ing Hunting Parties. I haven't thought about how BV will affect HP draws later on, but early on you'd expect it to foul up your engine. It is an extra action that could connect with a KC, but I don't KC a BV until the very last turn, so that seems not to be important.
There are two other star cards here. Bank is superb if you can work up to large hands. Pawn can be the deciding factor in going for KCs, as card draw of last resort but far more importantly as a handy source of Buys.
Game 5Too often recently I've tried to be cute with Silk Road in the presence of weak support and been punished for it. Here I held my nerve, trashed my Estates and made a conventional grab for Provinces. I was surprised to evenly split the Silk Roads against a rusher, but given the relative values of the Duchy and Silk Road in each of our decks, and that I overspent for all but my first Silk Road buy, a more concentrated attack on the Silk Roads wouldn't have affected the result. Ed's Silk Roads almost ticked over to 5 though, which would have been a huge swing with more Silk Roads in deck.
Game 6Protip: don't buy naked Farmlands if you're holding a Province in hand.
We both open Contraband nothing for a rapid start with the option for Farmland shenanigans later on to get round the penalty. We transition into Masquerade/Money: I stick to the script and only buy treasure/VP, whereas Ed picks up a Worker's Village as well as an extra Contraband and Masquerade, which I think were mistakes.
With Masquerade, Farmlands and no point counter I'm not entirely certain of the scores, and think that trashing the Province must have cost me the game. Seeing a chance to grab the final Farmland/Province, I take it, thinking things are unlikely to get better: I lose by a single point. Sigh.
Game 7Hamlet/Library is not something I've played often: it just doesn't seem to have come up. (I lost
one of my first Cornucopia games to Yaron when he spotted this strategy.)
I'm not sure what happened here. I split Oases 6/4 in my favour, and gave out 6 Curses against only 3 received. (Do you know of many other Sea Hag games where the Curses don't run out?) Duchies are bought, and we 3-pile on those, Hamlets and Oases.
