Got some gaming in this weekend. Went down to my friend John’s house, hoping to meet up with a mutual friend whose leaving for NYC, and hoping to catch Quyen for some gaming. Well… according to an email I got later, Quyen is in… well… you guessed it. NYC. Jan couldn’t come because he was going to some party at night.
John and I got some games in with the new card set, Dissension. It’s fairly interesting. Both of us are fairly blown away with this current cycle of cards (Rav,Pact,Diss) Most of the cards are fairly interesting, yet deep, yet powerful. Lot of fun really. If I was a couple of years younger, and had a more money, and wasn’t already addicted to World of Warcraft… I might be persuaded to play seriously again.
Anyway… I finally got a chance to play a game of Railroad Tycoon, the board game. Let’s just say… the game is freeking humongous. Bigger board than WoW:TBG by another 50 percent. It comes with all these little cool track hexes and little trains. Anyway… we got a 5 player game going. The rules are very simple. Only took me 15 mins or so to explain everything. Strategy was harder. I made sure to read the little strategy blurb in the manual to everyone before continuing.
So I go on to try to do exactly what the manual tells me to watch out for… dominating the northeast. I go into some serious early game debt trying to fight for it, leading me to be the first to get to 5 shares, and end up unable to ship anything for several turns. Then suddenly, I upgrade my engine to level 3, then level 4, and start chewin it up… leaving everyone else in the dust.
I end up taking by far the most shares… (13) by the end of the game, with the next being like 5 shares, and then the lowest being 2 shares. A lot of players were very conservative, making 2-4 link deliveries, where as I went straight for 5 to 7 link deliveries between the northwest. It looked like I had a huge commanding lead, but in the end, after we tabulated the points… I was ahead by 8 points, 5 of which were gimmee points that were given to me because I got lucky with a railroad operation card that came up.
All in all, I think everyone had fun. Most people put it in the light heavy kind of category (both in weight and time investment), but the rules weren’t nearly as stupid as wowtbg was. I’m hoping I get more people to play. I’m hoping other people pipe in and give me their input.
