After last weeks game on the Australia board, this week we played on Power Grid's India board, this provided a particularly intense game when we played with it at the end of January, but as I was refreshing myself on the changes before this game, I discovered that we had made an error in the previous game concerning the buying of resources. They are supposed to be sold in a series of rounds one unit at a time, in reverse player order. So I might buy 1 coal and then the next player buys 1 coal, followed by someone buying 1 oil and so on until everyone has passed. I thought that this seem as if it might be a bit fiddly but it worked pretty well and we didn't see players unable to buy sufficient resources in step 1 as we did in the previous game, although you still needed to be careful due to the limitations on the market in the early stages of the game.
In the game Stan was ahead for a lot of the time, but in the end he finished third not being able to build sufficient cities to match his capacity which was highest of everyone, I think this was due to buying too many plants over the course of the game. I had the opposite problem at the end as although I had the money to buy more cities, I did not have the capacity. If I'd bought another plant at the end, I could not have built cities to match. Possibly my problems could be traced back to a bidding was I got into with Steve over plant 30 early on, I got the plant but Steve was left with plant 31 for face value. Over the course of the game I think the extra cost Steve paid for Coal (over manure) probably made up the difference in the prices we paid for the plants but maybe the slight delay in my expansion at the time of the purchase may have made a difference (or maybe not). Steve was just able to buy the 17th city at the end to win. I suspect that had he not been able to then Stan could have won the following turn.
Of the other games played I have to say that Paperback looks like it might be an interesting filler. It seems to be a themed word game with a deckbuilding mechanic and sounds as if it might be worth giving a try. I having liked some word games in the past.
All the games details:
| 16/04/2014 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Power Grid - 130 Mins. | ||
| Posn. | Player | Score |
| 1 | Steve H | 17 |
| 2 | Dave D | 16 |
| 3 | Stan | 16 |
| 4 | John H | 15 |
| Kings of Air and Steam - 90 Mins. | ||
| Posn. | Player | Score |
| 1 | Chris S | 157 |
| 2 | Andy S | 155 |
| 3 | Mark W | 123 |
| 4 | Steve W | 118 |
| Paperback - 30 Mins. | ||
| Posn. | Player | Score |
| 1 | Steve W | 36 |
| 2 | Mark W | 20 |
| 2 | Andy S | 20 |
| 4 | Chris S | 9 |
| Glen More - 90 Mins. | ||
| Posn. | Player | Score |
| 1 | Mike | 52 |
| 2 | Gary B | 46 |
| 3 | Rachael | 46 |
| 4 | Lee | 43 |
| San Juan - 35 Mins. | ||
| Posn. | Player | Score |
| 1 | Mike | 31 |
| 2 | Lee | 29 |
| 3 | Gary B | 26 |
| 4 | Rachael | 24 |
My poorly written take on Kings of Air & Steam and Paperback =)
ReplyDeletehttp://christopherjeromesmith.co.uk/2014/04/22/halesowen-board-gamers-12-160414/
I had played Glen More once shortly after it was first released, struggled a bit with the landscape build and activate mechanism but there was certainly enough interesting other aspects to make me try it again when new members starting bringing copies of it again recently, and I am glad I did. It shares aspects with various other games, but they're put together well and the clever turn order mechanism gives it a nice twist, so definitely one to play as regularly as anything manages to get played here!
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of games that do get regularly played, another good game of San Juan with extra buildings to finish, I got very heavily into production and trading which is unusual for me, but it paid off for a satisfying win.