October 2009 Archives
I was fortunate enough to make it to the game night this week. Last Train to Wensleydale was most wanted of the new games, so we got full four players. Short version: it's good and worth buying.
Description of the game
Players build small railroads in the Yorkshire Dales, moving cheese, stone and passengers. Passengers are tricky, because they have specific needs, they need to reach the NER or MR network. Stone and cheese are easier to move.
Everything hinges on influence. There are four sorts: government, train, NER and MR influence. Players get influence from a Amun-Re style auction. Government influence determines track building order and is necessary to get rid of complaining farmers who want to block progress. Train influence is super important, as it's needed to rent trains and it also determines the order of goods movement. NER and MR influence are needed a bit in the track building and a lot in the end of the turn (I'll explain later).
Track-building is easy. You can only build one continuous stretch each turn, no forking! Track has a cost, which you can pay in investment cubes (= money that's replenished each turn) or influence. Building must start from a MR and NER town or from own track.
In the movement phase players rent trains of varying capacity and move stuff. Cheese can be moved if your track reaches the area where the cheese is, stone moves if your track is next to the hill with the stone. This is pleasantly simple. Red passengers want to reach a MR town, green passengers want to reach a NER town.
Players get profit from goods moved and collect those for end game scoring, loss is accrued from track on board. Placement on profit/loss track determines general turn order.
In the end of the turn, players can make one of the big companies to acquire their track. It takes a connection to a company town and some matching influence. No more losses from useless track! This is very important phase for the general well-being of your company.
This goes on for four or five rounds. After that you score your profit or loss, 1 point for each good moved during the game and 2 points for each set of four different goods.
Our session and my impression
I like the game. It's fairly hard to grok, I think we got it pretty much on the second or third round. Next time it'll go better. The rules aren't super clean, but we got only one thing wrong (the cost of takeovers). Still, takes a while to explain them.
The setup is notoriously tedious (two cubes are placed on each area, then wrong-coloured cubes - white on lowland, orange on hills - are removed, then passengers are placed in towns) and indeed a bit annoying. There's some fiddly tracking of influence, too.
The game took about 110 minutes. A bit long, but full of action and I can see fast experienced players playing this in 90 minutes. Still, two hours is fairly well justified, there's meat in the game (and I'm not talking about the board, which looks like a bacon omelette).
There's lots of clever stuff going on. I like the auctioning for company influence, the track-building, collecting goods and the takeovers - most of it, that is. Last Train is pleasantly different from the collect-the-shares train games and pick-up-and-deliver lot.
I started by building a track to Hawes in the middle of the hills. I kept the track the whole game, shipping plenty of stone to keep myself making profit. I also got some cheese and green passengers. The route had plenty of red passengers, but it took some effort and two turns of track-building to reach a red town. On the last turn, I did a separate track to gather up some more cheese and green passengers. I wasn't very efficient with the takeovers, so on the last turn I ended up on -3 in the profit/loss track.
However, I was the best with goods, gathering 34 points from four sets and ten more goods cubes. Petri got 23 (least cubes, +5 profit), Hannu 20 (29 points in cubes, -9 mostly from unnecessary track) and Tuomas 11 (21 points, -10 on p/l track).
I'm very glad to own the game and definitely want to explore it more. The different setups will lead to different games, so I suppose there's quite a bit of replay value there.
Olli and I played another game of 1825 Unit 3 (our first game, our second game). Even though it was a while since our previous game, we got the game up and running in just 10 minutes. That was pretty sweet.
On company selection
I got the large private, Olli started NBR and I took Caledonian. Caledonian headed towards Carlisle, while NBR took the usual northern route. As usual, NBR withheld a lot, while Carlisle paid good dividends.
Next Olli started Highland in the north, while I started GSWR. CR and GSWR work really well together, as I saw in our first game, so this was an obvious move for me. HR and NBR have some synergy, too.
Caledonian was somewhat hampered by Olli's token play, he closed the city in front of Glasgow, so CR was limited to two-city runs between that city and Glasgow. Nasty. He did another foul trick to GSWR later on, I should've put more effort into playing offensive tokens myself.
More minors
Well, my companies paid better dividends and soon I had a lot more certificates. The game looked pretty clear, but we decided to slug it through. We started more minors. Olli started Great North of Scotland, again at low par, while I started M & C at £100.
That has been something I've wanted to do, and it was a good move. First, it got me more profit. Olli raised GNS from 550 to 1120, while I got M & C from 1000 to 1800. Second, after I paid £370 for the 3T train, M & C had enough money to buy a 5 train (sold to GSWR for £10) and pay something like £200 to CR for a 2 train. M & C bought another junk train later on so I could make space to get a 7 train for GSWR.
In the end GSWR was the king, running 7, 5 and 3 (exact same combo I had for NBR last time! NBR made £540 runs, GSWR had £530). CR had 3, 3 and 4, while NBR had just 3T. NBR's share value was for a long time below 50, allowing both of us exceed the certificate limit.
Final scores
I must admit I was a wee bit surprised in the final reckoning. On the last round we counted the profits on a spreadsheet and it turned out I beat Olli only 738-719. He had more cash than I had, but still I won, mostly thanks to GSWR, of which I owned 80%. My first count was 6648-6572, but typing this session report I noticed a mistake in my calculations and the correct score was 7648-6572, which is quite decisive.
Again the main owner of NBR lost - this has been the case in all three games so far, interesting enough. So, a good game. I now have two victories against Olli's one.
Variant rules used
I used some modifications from Dave Berry's Unit 3 kit DB3. We agreed the addition of the city of Berwick-upon-Tweed on the east coast was a good one. The east coast has been bit of a dead area, but adding Berwick made it more interesting and I ended up building a route there (it was a good route, too). So that's something I'll be using from now on.
Changing Dumfries to a small town and removing one of the mountains between Glasgow and Carlisle was interesting, too. Dumfries is an easy target for CR, this change makes the historical route to Carlisle more likely and perhaps slightly slows down CR in the beginning. Not bad, and I'll definitely try this again. The extra 58 tile necessary was also used, though not on Dumfries.
Adding a small town of Galashiels in the mountain didn't make a difference in our game. Dave's new stock price index, on the other hand, was an excellent addition. It shows the dividend payments necessary for different levels of price advancement, reducing the amount of mental calculation required a lot. Highly recommended!
Picture of the board and the SPI after the game
Today ends our large board game auction. We have couple of hundred games for sale. See the auction at Lautapeliopas. Feel free to participate, if you understand the instructions and can pick up your games at Helcon or from me.
I made a huge inventory cleanup for the auction, I'm selling over 40 games. Lots of small card games, but plenty of big boxes. It's mostly games I don't like, but also some really good games I haven't played that much recently. There's Catan, Puerto Rico, Kardinal & König, Wings of War, For Sale, High Society, Phoenicia, FITS, things like that. Looks like I might make 400 euros from the auction, and what's best, I get lots of space in the board game closet so I can fit in new games.
Here's a picture of just about every game I'm selling:
(yes, there's a copy of Age of Steam in there, but don't worry, that's my spare copy)
I'm a wee bit late, since everybody played Ghost Stories back in Helcon last year, but I got it now as the Finnish version was published and we got it on the table today with Johanna - and got promptly butchered. It's one hell of a difficult game!
I suppose that's good, as beating the game is an actual challenge and I suppose that'll keep some people playing the game until they beat it and even then there's more replay value, but I'm pretty sure it'll be a turn-off for some, too. Kind of curious they did a Finnish translation, but I guess it's one of those "good chance to make a small print run" opportunities and Lautapelit.fi isn't going for the mass market with this one.
I'm not sure how I like the difficulty. The game looks splendid, if a bit busy, and seems a pain to explain. Well, now I understand the game better, having played it, so explaining it might be easier. I'm not terribly keen on it and I don't think it'll stay, but I do want to give it a four-player go - solid 75% of Geek voters thinks it's best with four.
A while ago I got a chance to play Steam over Holland. I introduced two of the locals to 18xx, since I've got those DIY projects and the DTG order - those are mostly more complicated stuff, not very good for newbies. So, Steam over Holland, the friendly newbie game!
I was actually quite happy to try the game with just three players, because my earlier experience seemed to indicate that's the best number of players. It is - there's enough money in the game to make things more interesting. It's still a bit quiet on the stock market front, but we got five companies running well, which was nice.
I won hands down, no surprises there. I suppose the guys got a pretty good idea on some of the dangers with the trains. Petri got to deliver a nasty punch for me with a train purchase, after which I caused one of Hannu's companies to go bankrupt with the next train type.
Fun game, the boys enjoyed it, we played swiftly - slightly over three hours, including rules, setup and cleanup! - and my new Sidepot Venerati poker chips were great.
