Steam age man

With a very special guest appearance this week from Jon Burgess and a featured role for Steve Dale it was a crowded table in the depths of beautifully redecorated Montpellier.

Making a decision from the fine selection of games presented to the group was a tough call – Agricola and Cosmic encounters were there or there about and Colosseum was piped at the post by Age of Steam (“Colosseum will be fun and only take a couple of hours” – “we’ll just play Age of Steam quickly, it’ll be fine!” were the fateful words). By the time the rules had been explained (move things towards cities that are the same colour!) it was half eight and the stock needed to get rolling.

Green – Joe

Red – Steve

Blue – Jon

Purple – Andrew

Yellow – me (Adam)

We chose the classic Rust Belt map and at the start there was none of the usual crowding in the middle as everyone rushed to the double goods at the edges – Jon taking the north west, Andrew the south, Joe and Steve the east leaving the middle the only place for me to go. Early urbanization and lengthening of the engine (sorry) saw me nudging into the lead. Jon was struggling out in a deserted city-free wasteland once he’d transported his first goods, Andrew was making good progress staking out St Louis and Joe led Steve a merry dance in the mountains around Wheeling.

In the mid-game I took control of the centre of the board, extending my engine to a powerful four lengths and making it hard for anyone else to get at the four cities I controlled. Even ineptly gifting some precious cargo to Joe and Steve couldn’t derail this momentum. Joe was only ever a couple of spaces behind on income, but had taken more shares so needed to pull out something special. Andrew started to flag as the strategy of singing Lonnie Donegan failed to pay off while Steve and Jon started getting the hang of it, building some cities of their own and getting into profit by round five.

Finishing a round “early” at 11.30 the final scores included a late charge from Steve hurling himself into third while Jon had the luxury of an hours journey home to ponder on lessons learnt:

Adam 78

Joe 52

Steve 36

Andrew 35

Jon 26

The Leaderboard

	Played	Points
Joe	13	27
Adam	14	24
Sam	8	15
Andrew	16	15
Jonny	6	8
Steve	4	9
Will	2	4
Quentin	2	2
Hannah	1	1
Jon	1	1