On Saturday, Joe, Ryan, Kevin, and Phil joined us for some gaming. We started the night off with some Acquire, which I hadn’t played in quite some time. I was able to start off decently, creating a couple companies. I fell behind, though, when I neglected one of my companies, and focused on the wrong one of my companies. I was able to make a decent profit holding on to the top position in two of the larger companies that merged prior to the end of the game, but I had no holding in the largest company at the end of the game. My wife was just able to overcome my profits with her proceeds from that stock at the end.
Next up was a game of Railways of the Eastern US. I had actually planned to play Railways of the Western US, but I had grabbed the wrong board. So we played Eastern with the rotating city tiles from the Western US game. We placed the rotating demands on Chicago, New York, Charleston, Pittsburgh and New Orleans. The biggest difference between the two games was made apparent from the first turn, when in the initial batch of cards, four Service Bounties and a Railroad Executive (allows a player to take two actions instead of one on that turn) showed up. Joe took a significant amount of debt, but he was able to win the first turn and secured two of the Service Bounties to immediately jump to an 11 point lead. Phil and I were able to get the other two Service Bounties, while Ryan went for the Passenger Lines bonus initially. After a few turns, he decided to go for the Major Line from Richmond to Atlanta for the bigger points instead. This allowed Joe to get the Passenger Lines bonus. At this point I was working around the Chicago area, due to my Baron giving bonus points for connections into Chicago along with there being a lot of red cubes in the area. I was able to get the Hotel Chicago early, and that provided a good number of points from everyone shipping there. I was also able to get the New York to Kansas City major line for 20 points. Sadly I was forced to do this a turn earlier than I wanted, giving me a bit more debt. In the end, I wasn’t quite able to catch Joe. I only got four points for my Baron, and had a bit more debt than he did. It ended up being a very close game, that really highlighted the differences between the Eastern and Western games.
As an afterthought, I will say that the rotating demands really made a difference. Chicago was a lot more useful with the ability to ship different colors there. New Orleans was also a more viable destinations. The other locations didn’t get as much use, due to there being more cities of different colors within a close proximity.
We followed that up with a couple games of Dominion. The first included a Witch with no defenses, so we ended up with a lot of extra cards in our decks, and no one could really get anything going. I ended up with negative points, and Kevin managed to sneak out a win, buying up a bunch of Estates and Duchies while no one was looking. The second game was a bit more reasonable, but I wasn’t able to get much rolling. I was blowing away my copper with Loans and Mines, but I wasn’t replacing them fast enough. I was eventually able to get into a good engine, but it was too late, as Joe was able to get things rolling with Laboratories and Conspirators and bought up a bunch of Provinces.
Overall it was a fun night with some close games. Until next time, happy gaming!
Meandering the Dune Sea 