Sunday, January 20, 2008

That's a big table (Railroad Tycoon, Citadels)

We played on Shemp's new Big Table. It's so big, it makes Railroad Tycoon seem reasonable. No. Really.

Railroad Tycoon

Our friend Agent Oral joined us for what was supposed to be a party of 7 but turned out to be a foursome (Bharmer and Luch were absent and my sister's fiancee, Pablo, got cold feet). We explained the game, along with the auction variant we play with (a For Sale! style auction to determine player order). We then debated what type of card variant we should try (the original method of laying out 2x #of players + 1 every turn seems limited). We went with 2x # of players + #players each turn. That was too many cards, so we'll try something else next time ... maybe start with cards=# of players + 1/2 # of players every turn afterwards? We'll see.

Shemp and Kozure fought over the north-east. I split my attention between the central-east and the Chicago area. Oral went south to capitalize on a service Bounty in Mobile. I built a nice little network which gave me a nearly endless supply of 4 link deliveries, but it was only good for second place... Kozure finished the giant East-West twenty pointer and ran away with the victory. Railroad Tycoon continues to be a very fun game. As soon as we can come up with a better card distribution method, it'll be that much better.

Citadels

Citadels hasn't been played at WAGS in ages. That's not by accident, with 4 or 5 players it's not very good (because of the way it works out with the card removed, the player who sits to the right of the king gets really screwed). However, since Agent Oral had to leave, we were left with 3 and I quite like it as a 2 or 3 player game. I HEAR it's good with 6, 7 or 8, but I've never played. Ironically, I brought it since I expected a big crowd, but I was happy to play it with our small one.

Kozure caught himself in a few instances of out-second(triple)-guessing himself into mistakes. I made the mistake of taking the King and Merchant too predictably and getting assassinated. Shemp made the fewest mistakes and, appropriately, won the game.

Anyway, I had a pretty good run in won games last year, but this year seems to belong to Kozure. With Railroad Tycoon tonight, I think he's won 3/4s of the games played. Time to take him down.

2 comments:

  1. Pablo got cold feet? I bet that didn't go over too well with your sister!

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  2. Ha, ha! It's a joke, son.

    Uh, anyway..

    It was great to play RT again, but I agree that the cards didn't work the way we'd hoped. This may be nitpicky or wonkish, but I think your idea of turning up 1/2 the number of cards per players every round is a little to limiting. I'd like to see something more along the lines of 2/3x, rounded up, or x-1, or x-2, where x= the number of players. It's finetuning, but I wanted to throw it out there.
    I hadn't played Citadels in ages, but it was a lot of fun with 3, which I wouldn't necessarily have guessed.

    Lastly, the strawberries, they were good. Looking forward to using The Big Table again. C'mon, Civ! Bring it!

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