Richard was first to place, again (red, as ever), and there were two 'obvious' good places I could see, plus a third which in fact he took (the 8-3-4). He likes to have either an 8 or a 6 in his first placement, and hadn't realised that the two 5-9-10 intersections were actually slightly better, from the statistical point of view, as well as being good from the clay-wood perspective.
I could see that ore was likely to be in very short supply in this game. It's often the key to winning - but the 4-ore tile wasn't next to others good enough to be worth taking as my first settlement. Or so it seemed. So I opted for one of the 5-9-10s, near the clay harbour, and Sheila (blue) took the other one. Jörn, going last (blue), was able to get all five resources, in theory, including two spots on ore hexes, which was a good move. Sheila then took the other spot on the 4-ore hex that was worth having, unsurprisingly. So although I did briefly consider taking the 4-11-desert space, I went instead for the other 11-ore spot, with a 4 on clay and 6 on wheat.
Surprisingly, there were a few 11s rolled early in the game, which was useful from the ore perspective, and meant that both Jörn and I achieved cities quite soon. Richard did well for both clay and wood, which wasn't surprising; indeed, there was rather a lot of clay in the game early on so I was fairly quickly able to gain the clay harbour. I had to do a fair bit of trading to get there since 10s were NOT rolled; I had a hard time getting any sheep at the beginning of the game.
Richard gained the longest street card with five streets.. and we realised that, unusually, all four of us had five points each:
Rather a lot of 8s were rolled, which were only of benefit to Richard, so he continued expanding. Not as fast as he would like to have done, since he was hit more than once by a 7 just as he'd collected eight cards. But he maintained his longest street, and for a while was well in the lead. He reached 10 points when Sheila had 9, and Jörn and I both had 6. I had a hard time getting to the stage where I could build another settlement, and we were all running short of future building spots.
Then Sheila connected her sections of street, and overtook Richard's longest road. She had 11 points, and he was down to 8. It wouldn't have taken much for him to have connected his two sections and added another; potentially he could reach longer than she could if they continued competing for it.
Meanwhile I'd started buying cards - nobody had early in the game, due to the lack of sheep and ore, but since I'd run out of building spots, and wasn't getting a lot of ore, I thought I might as well buy cards instead. I'd played two knights and hoped for another so I could at least claim the largest army, but it wasn't to be. On my final round I bought two cards, one of which was a victory point card, and the other a monopoly. I was going to watch carefully to see which resources accumulated over the next round... but instead Sheila built her last city, making her the winner with 12 points.
It was a resounding victory; Richard was second with 8 points, I also had 8 including my victory point card, and Jörn had 7.
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