Austrian rails

Stefu made a surprise visit. He charmed Nooa, we talked about kids a lot (he's got a daughter himself) and in the end played some games as well. Stefu suggested something heavier and we ended up playing Age of Steam on John Bohrer's Austria map.

It's a strange map, very small and constricted. There are no shares and three shipping phases. All building costs $4. I kind of liked it, but I did lose the game on the second round... Stefu was shipping fives and sixes a lot, while I got perhaps one five and mostly fours. He just got a wider part of the network. It's very constricted where you can build and I was blocked out a lot. End result was 182-144...

Next time I'll probably know better, but with the new Bézier two-player maps coming, I'm not sure when that next time is going to come. With my current maps, I'd rather play Scotland, really. Austria has pretty good ideas and it's not a bad game, but perhaps a bit too restricted (and I'm somewhat worried of the replayability).

After that - the game took snappy 45 minutes, which was nice - we played a round of Stefu's little game Deduxe. It's a simple pen-and-paper deal, where you fill 6x6 grid with numbers and try to form sets and deduce dead squares. It's simple, quite fun, but felt a bit odd. There are some possibilities for degenerate plays if players don't play "well". But hey, I won it, so...