25th March - Carcassonne on a PC

Well this week Steve and I took a break from playing board games and decided to try the Carcassonne PC game. Steve had got the game a few days previous and had already played over 40 games! He's set up a four player game, us and 2 'bots'. It's a good interpretation of the board game and if you know how to play the original you should have no problem playing the computer game.

A laptop yesterday

The 2 bots played to a high standard and I came last, but I have reservations about playing computer versions of board games. I work at a PC all day so playing a computer game is a bit like a busman's holiday. I like playing board games because of the social interaction, I like taking on a human opponent and the bits are nice. But the computer game doesn't have any of that, I've played it a couple of times on my own since (with the skill level set lower so I stood a chance of beating it), the thing is I love computers I build my own, read magazines and really enjoy working on them, but I found it an empty experience, I'd rather have read a book. I must be feeling extra grumpy today.

I didn't record the score but I lost

11th March - Rails of Europe

Rails of Europe is the long waited for expansion for Railroad Tycoon. You get a new map, thankfully not as big as the original, and some cards. Play is pretty much the same as Railroad Tycoon with a few exceptions, there are some 'Major Routes' marked on the board and you get points if you are the first to complete the route. Richard and Steve started of in the middle of the map and were fighting amounst themselves for most of the game, they almost seemd to have forgotton about me and I manages to create a large network running from the south of Spain and Portugal all the way up to Amsterdam and Berlin.



The End of the game was fairly close and I managed a win by 2 points. Overall we all like the game and in my opinion it's a much better map that the American one, things are much tighter in Europe and there is a lot of player interaction even with 3 players, it's still not as tight as Age of Steam though. If you own the original game I would thoroughly recommend that you buy this expansion.

Garry 110, Richard 108, Steve 86

1st March - Pasteboard and Plastic

It's been ages since I've updated this blog so I guess I've fulfilled the half hearted part of my remit. Any way I' skim over some of the games we've played in the last month or so in an effort to catch up. Pasteboard and Plastic is a games day held in the Scout hut in Saltdean just outside of Brighton. It start's early and runs fairly late so people can come and go as they want. I arrived at 10am and started a game of Vikings, I've covered Vikings in another posting but it's a much overlooked game The three people who I taught it to had never played before but all enjoyed it.

Pete 60, Garry 33, Adrian 28, Chris 26

We come from the land of Ice and snow...

Next up was a quick couple of games of Felix: The cat in the sack. This was a big hit at Essen, it's fairly light and a good amount of luck is involved but it was very cheap (9 euros), plays quickly and makes a good filler.

Each player plays a card on the table, one card is turned over and then the playes start bidding for them, If a player drops out he takes a some coins and turns the next card over so the remaining players have a better idea of what they're bidding on. So lots of fun and we had a good laugh playing it. I'm looking forward to playing it with my non game playing friends.

Gary 56, Pete 43, Garry 25, Steve 25
Tom 63, Steve 28, Helen 24, Garry 13

After a quick sarnie Steve and I had a couple of games of Karo, I obviously wasn't concentrating as I lost 2-0. Then Tony joined us for a game of Spiel der Turme. This the 3rd time I've played this in the last few months and it gets better each time, I don't think I'd rush out and buy a copy but its an enjoyable multiplayer abstract.Once again I left it too late to start moving my towers into the scoring squares and came on last.

Tony and Steve playing Spiel der Turm
Steve 24, Tony 8, Garry 3

My final game of the day was Dungeonville a Zman game about exploring Dungeons hmmm... I wasn't sure about this, It has the same push your luck element as Diamant but the mechanism seems overly complicated, so you can make as many optimised plays as you like then it will all fall apart on the luck of the draw, not one for me.


Mike 7 Richard 6, Garry 7

Feb 28th - Age of Steam Barbados

I really enjoyed last nights Age of Steam so I thought I'd try my hand on one of the single player maps that I'd bought at Essen last year. The Barbados map is fairly small and as you're not going to be fighting for connections with other players it not much of a problem.


There are 6 Yellow cities printed on the map to start with and I only drew a couple of yellow cubes at the start of the game, to ship the rest of the cubes I had to build some more cities, this worked out quite well as my red black and blue cubes all managed to ship for fairly high points. If I'd draw more yellow cubes near the end I would have been stuck with short shipping routes. A great little map and a good way to hone your AoS skills

Me 16 points

Feb 27th - Age of Steam Europe

Age of Steam again this week, as a point of interest I have never played this game on the same map twice, and I've played a few times. This time we're playing on the new(ish) Bezier games Europe map.

The map at the end of the game

Richard started building in the UK and down through France and Germany, there were quite a few towns to connect together in that region. Steve started to connect up around the Adriatic as there were a few cubes that could be delivered for 4 points. I had planned to build there but as Steve had beaten me to it I took my second option of build a nice little loop in Spain. As the game progressed Steve had a lot of trouble getting over the Alps and connecting to anything else, eventually he ran out of puff and went bankrupt a turn before the end. In his final few turns he had nothing to ship so he made it difficult for us by shipping Richard's and my cube's for1 point a pop, we both had a few cubes that could have shipped for 6 or 7 points that just went for 1, arrrgh!!!! A good map, but I think it would be better with 4 players.

Hmm... after reading up on the geek it looks like we played a couple of rules wrong. The express link has to be built between 2 CITIES, not towns. And when you place goods on the board as part of the Production action you can take them from anywhere (as long as there are 4 from the left and 4 from the right) on the goods production chart not just the top rows.

Richard 165, Garry 124, Steve Bankrupt

Feb 19th - King of Siam/Spiel der Turme

We were three players tonight as Jo was able to make it, made a nice change from all the 2 player games we've played recently. It was Steve's choice and her chose two games that we'd played last month King of Siam and Spiel der Turme. If you want to see pictures of these games have a look at the report from January.

In King of Siam you have to collect cubes OFF the board and try and gain a majority share in the colour that wins the most regions on the board, of course the colour that wins the territory is the colour with the most cubes ON the board. So it's a bit tricky, the more cubes you take the less chance that you can back a winner so you have to be careful with your timing. Also each player has the same 8 cards with which to move the cubes around, you can pass your turn at any time but you still only have 8 turns and as there are 8 territories on the board there is a lot to consider.

This time I decided against collecting even numbers of each colour at the beginning, last time I found that I ended up with an 'average' number of each colour and that's not enough to win. I also made sure that I didn't fight for every territory as with only 8 cards you have to let some cubes go and concentrate on the ones that you can pick up a little easier.

Well it seemed as though it paid off and I just scraped a win (whh hooooo!)

Garry 1st, Steve 2nd, Jo 3rd


As before we got Spiel der Turme out next, the idea is to stack your pieces up by jumping on other pieces with the same symbol on. Your towers only score when they are on one of the blue scoring squares at the end of the game, the games ends when all 4 square of one of the blue areas gets filled, if you can manage to fill them all with your own pieces then you get a double point bonus.

At the start of the game it can look a bit confusing with loads of bits everywhere but as pieces start stacking up it then starts to become clearer. Getting all four of the blue square covered by your own pieces is an obvious advantage, but as soon as you put one piece in then people will jump in on the others, so I hung back biding my time until I could swoop in and steal victory from under the noses of my opponents. Well it didn't quite happen like that as I left it too long and the game ended a bit quicker than I'd anticipated although I had plenty of stacks ready to pounce I only had 1 in a blue scoring area - disaster!

Jo 29, Steve 12, Garry 5

Feb 5th - 2 Player Vikings

Richard's still off throwing himself down snow covered mountains somewhere so there's just 2 of us. After looking on the 'geek for a few suggestions of multi-player games that work well for 2 I settled on Vikings which was one of last years Hans Im Gluck/Rio Grande releases.


It's a medium weight game where you are the leader of a band of vikings and you have to colonise a group of islands with your Viking meeples (veeples?). A set of Vikings and island tiles are drawn at random and placed around a wheel that has prices on. On you turn you can buy any one island and coresponding viking to add to your colony. The trick is not to pay too much but the wheel moves around as pieces are taken and things get cheaper and cheaper, of course the longer you wait there's a chance that the piece you wanted will get bought by someone else. After each round your colony is scored and you get gold and VP's depending on how well you build you colony. We played twice, once with the standard rules and once with the advanced rules. Both games we fairly close but Steve managed to beat me both times (ever since I started this blog I've failed to win anything, I'm wondering if it's cursed). Vikings is a great game and plays very well with 2 players, thoroughly recommended.

Steve 87, Garry 86
Steve 105, Garry 93