Session Report – 11 August 2010

8 this week including my (and Mike and Dave C's) old school friend John, who was in the area again on a quick visit. We split into 2 groups.

John, Colin, Andy & I played Coast to Coast Rails, which Andy has been carrying around for a bit, this is another Train game set in the USA, the idea is to invest in shares in various companies attempting to build railways from coast to coast and is played in alternate stock rounds, where 3 shares are auctioned in each of the companies, followed by building rounds.

It is the nature of the game that it is possible to calculate with a good degree of accuracy the potential earnings of the company and use that to base your bidding on, unfortunately at the start of the game I was failing to take into account the system that you were bidding for 2 shares rather than 1 so I was underbidding. The game is such that there is definitely a rich get richer tendency and although I would not say there was a runaway leader problem (there isn't) I definitely see that if you screw up at the start (which I did) then you should forget it for that game and wait for another try (if you are so inclined (which I'm fairly sure I'm not).

The game, to me, has the same issues I have with Chicago Express in that you buy shares and they earn you money, but then they never go down in value and are not worth anything at the end of the game. In addition to that, in this game, you buy your shares which you would expect to be used by the company to fund its building, but it actually goes into a black hole never to be seen again and it is then left to the players who have already paid for shares to dig into their pockets again to pay for the track building. This all seems thematically nonsensical to me.

I have said in the past that I like train games, but I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that this should be narrowed to the 18XX series, which were my first introduction to train games, and the Mayfair Crayon rails games.

Coast-to-Coast Rails 100 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	John H	318
2	Andy	271
3	Colin	258
4	Dave D	226

After that we played Pandemic, using the characters and special events from the On the Brink expansion, but not any of the advanced challenges. As some players were new to the game I prepared the deck with just 4 epidemics.

The roles drawn were the Epidemiologist (John), Medic (Colin), Troubleshooter (Andy) and Archivist (myself) and resulted in a fairly easy win for the players, the roles seemed good with both Andy and I being able to fly about the board without using up cards, while John's ability was helpful for gathering the cards needed for a cure together. At the same time Colin was able to deal with treatment, even better when the first cures were in place.

I took a mental note to make it a bit more difficult next time (but see next post).

Pandemic 30 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Dave D	W
1	John H	W
1	Colin	W
1	Andy	W

On the other table there was Cyclades, which I don't know a great deal about, other than it has an Amun-Re style auction mechanism.

Cyclades 120 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Steve H	NA
2	Dave F	NA
2	Mike	NA
2	Andrew S	NA

And another run out for The Speicherstadt.

The Speicherstadt 45 mins.
Posn.	Player	Score
1	Andrew S	29
2	Dave F	25
3	Steve H	24
4	Mike	16