You try to be evil, and look what happens

This week's post title comes courtesy of Adam, who remarked on Ian's inadvertent niceness during the highly-combative trains-and-shares game that is Mini Rails. We were all trying to be evil, but evil's by-products were sometimes running off in unwelcome directions.

Oven, with Adam 

But I'm getting ahead of myself, because before Mini Rails arrived, some other games were seen. We assembled around Steve and Anja's table, joined occasionally by bag-fetishist cat Molly and, somewhat incongruously watched by an oven in front of the bookshelves. As well as the hosts there was me (Sam), Adam, Ian and Martin, and after some preliminary chat we played a six-player game of Just One, the co-operative challenge of word-guessing and clue-giving. I was first to guess and appalled Martin (maybe everyone, but Martin put it into words) by not getting the word 'Large' from the clues Massive, Little, Big, Elephantine, and Hadron. I'd forgotten the Hadron Collider is actually the Large Hadron Collider. To be honest, having used the word 'Elephant' as my example when explaining the game, I kept looking at 'Elephantine' in some confusion, wondering if it was some meta clue.

We shrugged off my error and steamed on to a victory the game grudgingly declared as reasonable, with Anja the other incorrect guesser. I can't remember what the word (or guess) was now, but fun was had.

Then we split into two threes, with Martin coaxing Steve and Anja into playing his latest Knizian purchase, Prosperity, and Ian, Adam and I playing Letter Tycoon.

Letter Tycoon has light rules but does require some thinking time, so I didn't really perceive what was happening in Prosperity. It looked like a score-track, some communal tiles, some communal tile claiming and individual tile appropriation/arrangement in ways that made them help each other. Possibly. I did hear Steve complaining that he wasn't being prosperous, though.

On our wordy side of the table we were trying to make long words and buy patents on letters, which would pay us whenever our opponents used the letters in question. Some patents (on the lesser-travelled letters) also gave special powers: Adam scored double, for instance, when his word began and ended with vowels. We also discovered a new rule (© me) that you can only buy the patents for the letters in the word just played, which made a lot of sense, albeit it did make the game marginally slower. Ian got lots of cheap patents that didn't pay out a great deal. Adam saved up for the E. My combo of T, R and S paid dividends, literally:

Sam 46
Adam 41
Ian 27

In Prosperity there was still much hypnotic staring at the table in process, with raucous laughter and high-velocity swearing (©Martin) notably absent, and the end not yet in sight. So we decided to give Mini Rails a go, albeit BGG warned us it was a better game with 4 or 5 players rather than three...

Over six rounds every player takes two company discs and activates two actions: build track (for one of six companies); or take a share. Whatever share you take has a value of zero at first, no matter what the current value of the company. And the company value changes when track is built: building onto a hex with white pips increases the value; red pips make it drop, and shares can drop well below zero. Everyone wants the companies they've invested in to take the most fruitful route to the centre of the board (five white pips!) only to have Adam or Ian (or me) veer their track off in shitty directions.

To that very simple premise though there is a considerable catch - at the end of each round, one company disc will be left over, and this company has 'paid its taxes'. At the end of the game all companies who have 'paid their taxes' can ignore any shares in the negative values. And any companies who haven't, ignore shares that would have paid out (but still take the hit on negative value shares). So it's quite possible to invest heavily in a company only to have it never pay taxes and subsequently turn to Madoff Investement Securities in your hands. And as Adam noted, it's also quite possible to set out nefarious and end up accidentally benevolent as well...

Second round in process. Yellow paid taxes in round one.

There's quite a bit of head-scratching as every action you take has considerable ramifications -temporary alliances are forged, and then broken, in an ongoing game of track-based regicide. I won, but I can't really claim to have done so with wit or cunning. We were all faintly bamboozled, but also bewitched. An intriguing game!

Sam 10
Ian 9
Adam 3

Prosperity was still prospering - in terms of time, anyway - so the three of us bashed through a quick three-player Just One, using the variant of being able to pitch in two clues each. It makes the game too easy, really, but it was quite fun finding ways to combine your clues together.

My clues for 'lake'

Then, just like for the UK in the near future, Prosperity ended!

Martin 38
Anja 21
Steve 13

Nobody seemed electrified, though they all said it was interesting. Maybe the comments will illuminate us.

Steve, who'd been managing a dicky tummy as well as those clever Knizian cogs, instantly retired to bed. Anja stayed up for one more game - another blast of Just One, where our attempts to achieve the perfect 13 were undone on our very first word. I can't remember what it was now. We were all impressed by Martin getting 'pebble' from this though:

Martin hazarded you'd use a pebble to judge the depth of water (listening to the sound it makes) although Echo clue-giver Anja was actually referencing 'Echo Beach' by Martha and the Muffins. She said she was assuming someone else would write 'beach' as a clue, although considering Martin's clue-giving was, wherever possible, based on niche indie bands, I thought if he'd got that, he might well have ended up guessing 'muffin'. But he didn't.

We ended with another average score, according the rulebook's palpable disdain, but everyone enjoyed Just One - it serves as a good evening starter and ender. Which brings us to the end of this particular one, with thanks to our gracious hosts and big digital high-fives all around.  Until next time...