Weekend Gaming: Go West!

Image used from Board Game Geeks

With some of the birthday money I received this year, I went and ordered a copy of the Railways of the Western U.S. expansion for Railways of the World. If you have been a regular follower here, you’ve probably noticed that Railways of the World has become a very frequent fixture on our game table. So it was definitely time to add some variety with a new map.

We had six of us playing on Saturday, with Phil, Ryan, Louis, and Kevin joining my wife and I. The game got off to a pretty quick start, with three relatively easy service bounties available. I wasn’t willing to start the game with a ton of debt, so I was not able to cash in on any and just started to make deliveries along the West Coast while going for the Tacoma to L.A. major Line. Ryan was making deliveries in the Montana region along with Louis, while Kevin and Phil were dedicated to the southern and eastern portions of the map. Gina running straight through the middle with the major line from San Francisco to Promontory. Louis ended up with the best plans and was able to make quite a few 5 point deliveries through the Midwest, which really helped his score. I was able to get a few 7 point deliveries going using some Fuel Depots, but they were slow going, and I started them too late to really cash in on them. I finished the game in second, just 6 points behind Louis.

It was fun playing a new map, and definitely threw a wrench into our plans. Two things really stood out to me. The first was that we ha an inordinate number of cities that were filled with goods of that color (i.e. a blue city filled with blue cubes) and that couldn’t be delivered anywhere nearby. Louis was able to get a bigger train fastest and deliver some of those, but the rest of us hadn’t planned well enough. The other was that outside of the first turn, there were no Service Bounties available. Nothing came up out of the Operations Cards deck, and since there is no Railways Executive card in this expansion, there wasn’t an incentive to really bid much on the turn auction. Most auctions were won for 1-2 thousand. Other than those oddities, the game definitely seemed more balanced than Eastern US. There are a lot of mountains in the West, keeping track prices high, plus the bonuses available aren’t worth as many points and are typically harder to get. This kept the scores lower and reduced the available money. No one person was really able to jump out to an early lead and dominate.

After that, we played a couple games of Dominion. The first was pretty weak, with no extra actions, but a lot of buys. Kevin was able to get the most consistent deck and was able to grab a couple extra Duchies, beating me for the win. the second game, though, was quite entertaining. First off was the matter of deciding what Kingdom cards to use. Since we had 6 people, we selected 4 random cards from the deck, coming up with the Counting House, City, Adventurer and Bishop. Then each person selected on card in secret. I selected the Loan, Phil the Thief, Kevin a Forge, Ryan the Remodel, Gina the Goons and Louis the Mountebank. It was an interesting way of doing it, though I know a couple people had regrets once they saw what others picked. The game started off with the Thieves selling like hotcakes. I was able to get 4 of them, and for the first few rounds it was impossible to go a full round without someone playing a Thief. Eventually I was able to get 5 coins into my hand and picked up a Counting House, and that was it for me. Between the Thieves, Loans, and a couple others playing Mountebanks, I was able to get a ton of copper into my deck. I also go lucky and would typically draw one of my Counting Houses about halfway through my deck and thus was able to gather up a bunch of copper out of my discard pile to buy Colonies. I was able to do this at least three times. Phil, on the other hand, was trying essentially the same thing, but he’d invariably draw his Counting House early on, and was unable to really get enough to buy the big points. Kevin was hitting the Cities hard, and getting quite a bit of money and points that way, but I was able to get my combo off enough times to take the game by about 10 points, even with a Province and an Estate being nullified by Curse cards.