16th June - Steam

Steam again, this time the German map. We all really like Steam, we played it with the Standard rules to see how it compared to the Basic game, we prefered the basic game by 3 votes to 1. With that said both games are very good, just different.

Richard 62, Matt 48, Steve 45, Garry 42

10th June - Automobile

Richard got a copy of Automobile at the UK Game Expro. Like a lot of Martin Wallace's games it takes a while to get the hang of the rules but after that it's fairly straight forward. As it was our first game it was very difficult to work out what to do, that coupled with the rules gave my brain a bit of a work out.

We all agreed that we would have done things differently once we realised how the mechanisims worked together (especially Lance who seem to be collecting black cubes like he was General Motors). So we'll need to play it again before I pass judgement.

Richard 4120, Steve 3910, Garry 3590, Lance 2820

3rd June - Back again and Steam

I've started blogging again. I stopped as I was finding it difficult to find new things to say, what do you write about the 20th game of Agricola? So from now on it'll be brief with just the game we played and the scores etc , there may be a a few other words depending on how much time I have.

Last night we played Steam the new Martin Wallace remix of Age of Steam and very good it was too. Richard won but it was a very close game

Richard 42, Matt 41, Garry 39, Steve 36

9th Dec - Le Havre again

After Sundays 5 hour slog I was keen to try a short game of Le Havre with less players. Our Tuesday group was down to 3 players this week, so it was an ideal chance to give it another go whilst it was still fresh. Lance joined us for the first time this week, we met him at our hotel in Essen and as he just lives up the road he came down for a visit.


Richard and I gave Lance a rules intro and we got started. It certainly played a lot better with 3 and the short version of the game shouldn't be seen as an inferior version. With a few pointers, Lance, who hadn't played before, did remarkably well.

I still have some issues with it, the poor rules being one of them. Also once there are a lot of buildings in play it gives the players a lot of options and because of that it does make things very difficult to thwart other players. Also there are a lot of buildings (cards) and to play the game well you really need to know what they do, there is no way you can pick this up easily, you need to play the game several times.

There is a good game in there somewhere, hopefully with a few more plays it will reveal itself (I have my fingers crossed)

Richard 136, Garry 133, Lance 130

7th Dec - Le Havre

Richard decided to give Le Havre a go on Sunday evening. We knew it was going to be a long game with 5 players so we made an early-ish start. In Le Havre you collect resources at the harbour and use these to build buildings and ships which enable you to grow your wealth and feed your workers.

One thing I must mention is the fact that the rule book is probably one of the worst that I've ever read, a lot of the important litte rules are in really funny places, some of the them are listed in the components listing on the front of the booklet and last night I found something in very small text on the board. Very strange. I need to go through everything again and make a list of easily missed rules and how to set things up for the long and short games for different numbers of players.

One thing we paid no attention to was the comment that the 5 player game should only be played by experienced players, to hell with that! 3 of us had played once before so we decided to play the 5 player long game. Well it took us over 5 hours to play, I had no idea what I was doing and after a while I realised that I'd made several strategic errors and had to wait hours for the game to churn it's way to the end.

It is a good game, but I would really recomend that you start with just a few players and the short game.

Jo 136, Richard 136, Mike 132, Steve 118, Garry 83

2nd Dec - Agricola

We're all still enjoying Agricola a lot. Not much to say about it other than we all realy like it and it's our most played game of the year so far, no one has really got into Dominion yet and I've still not played it. Interesting game in that most people weren't building fences until the very end - hmm...

Matt 34, Steve 31, Richard 25, Garry 24

25th Nov - Vikings

Just 3 of us this week and we Decided on Vikings. We've played this several times before and really liked it.


After a brief recap we were off, it's been a little while since I'd played so I made a few mistakes at the beginning and nearly ran out of money a couple of times. It didn't take too long to play so we had time for another go, the scores were a bit tighter this time around.

Steve 98, Matt 77, Garry 55
Matt 61, Steve 60, Garry 58