For this game night the group played the game Lord’s of Vegas a 2010 release from Mayfair Games. The theme for the night was building the iconic casinos of Sin City from it’s earliest days. The game starts with zero casinos on the strip, just a bunch of mom and pop shops and parking lots.

Through the games actions you “build, sprawl, reorganize and gamble to make your casinos bigger and more lucrative to gain points and win the game.” Strictly speaking, this is an area control game with some unique control mechanisms using dice. The scoring system has jump points as you move further along the track, this makes small casinos only useful for cash input not points.

The deck of cards that controls the casino payout had a very odd distribution during this play, causing the players to have some cash flow problems. Two of the five casinos colors were just not built in this game making some turns really cash poor. The way this played out roughly led to forty percent of the possible money to be made being kept out of this game. What it led too was one of the most sparsely built game boards I have ever seen in Lord’s of Vegas. It was an interesting play dynamic, decisions were tougher, and the game wasn’t as free wheeling as it normally feels.

All that said I enjoyed this play and how unique it felt.

Congratulations to Scott for getting his first win in the Game Night group. He played very well gaining control of the first five size casino while none of us had the resources to strong arm him out of the boss position.

The locked up board state didn’t leave a lot of room to manuever causing smaller score deltas. A three way tie on the score board wasn’t a big surprise, so going to tie breaker (money): second (Tim $42M), third (Colleen $36M), and fourth (Luke $30M). Colten was fifth for the evening losing control of very valuable casinos at some of the most inopportune times really hurt his scoring.

Final Scores:

  Knight Score
1 Scott 49
2 Tim 32*
3 Colleen 32*
4 Luke 32*
5 Colten 23