Thursday session: Chinatown, Wabash

I'm a bit busy with all sorts of stuff, and my blog writing tends to suffer. I finally got the playing-card review posted - I scanned the pictures in June and the blog entry was created more than a week ago... but now it's up, and next is our board game session from last Tuesday (yes, Tuesday, I just call these Thursday games because that's what they used to be and will be from September on).

We started with Chinatown - the new French edition was published in Finnish (I did the translation) and I just got my copy. There was some enthusiasm to get the game on table, so that's what we did. We had five players, with exactly one player with previous experience.

It was fun, for a trading game. The initial trades are hazy and the final trades are perhaps too easy to calculate, but in the middle there's some fun trading action. There are enough options to make for interesting dealing and negotiating, as what you want may well be distributed among many different players. Getting that three-way deal done can be a nice challenge.

I do understand the common complaints against Chinatown, but after one play I'd still say it's an entertaining game. Taken really seriously it might go flat and I'm not sure it's a keeper for me, but I do expect to play it again.

We also played a five-player game of Wabash Cannonball - for some reason, I've avoided playing Wabash with five, but I was pleasantly surprised: five-player Wabash is a good game. We had two newbies and three experienced players... Hannu was left without a share in the initial auctions, but he almost managed to grab two shares in the first round. That would've been nice for him, but it was fairly easy to prevent.

Hannu did win the game in the end, and with a surprisingly small portfolio. He did get some luck with the Wabash, as the game run longer than I expected. It was a good game, anyway, and reminded me of why I enjoy the game as much as I do.