Railing against the Western Link

A rare Friday night gaming session last night as Ian, Joe, and Chippenham Chris sat down around the enormous Eastern US map of Railways of the World. During the day Joe and I had debated which map to play and settled on Europe, before it transpired that neither of us owned it. So here we were at sunset of the working week, but the dawn of the locomotive. I had forgotten quite how much table space America demanded.

Ian was green, Joe red, Chris yellow and I blue. Immediately there was a bidding war which Joe won, using his seniority in turn order to ship the first cube and get a Service Bounty to Louisville. I built in the south, Ian in the west and Chris was unmolested in the northeast, despite the fact we all agreed aloud that anyone building there needed molesting. For a while we stayed away from each other and our primary interaction was in the bidding wars, mainly, it often seemed, on principle. Nobody wanted to be last. 

Then I claimed Passenger Lines and a while after, a long-distance route. But Ian claimed two such routes in the same round, one of them even by accident. At this point, things were tightly competitive:

Then Joe frowned a bit at lagging slightly on the track and Ian belatedly began hampering Chris in the north-east. My focus was mainly on blue cubes, which seemed to proliferate in the south, giving me numerous short-to medium distance delivery options: my train never got higher than a level 4 loco. In contrast the other players kept improving their engines and Ian revealed his best-engine Baron when he reached level 6. Joe built a western link for $30k but found to his horror that he was generating cubes in Chicago that Ian would subsequently deliver for shitloads of points. He stopped delivering to Chicago.

In the end, it was a very convincing victory for Ian - even if I'd satisfied my Baron, I wouldn't have caught him:

Ian 89
Sam 82
Chris 80
Joe 77

We packed away happily sated, and with plenty of gas still in the tank. Joe produced Pass Pass, which I'd missed on Tuesday but can explain - sort of - now. This is a trick-taking game where you aren't obliged to follow suit - though you may want to. There are four such suits numbered 1-12 and when a trick is played any suited cards combine: for example, Chris and my blue cards of 6 and 8 will be a blue 14 and beat out Joe and Ian's yellow 10 and 2. The player who played the highest card of the winning suit claims any card they like from the trick, and the player who played the second-highest card of the winning suit gets the two lowest-value cards from the trick. And at the end of the round you score a point per card plus a point per diamond that occasionally appear on a few of the cards. And after three rounds, most points wins.

But wait because that's not all. If during a round you manage to claim a card of each suit, this is called a pass pass. If you get three pass passes before scoring the final round, you instantly win the entire game! This means you're juggling not only the points you want for yourself, but what you need to deprive of others - which in turn affects the game's temporary alliances and card-claiming. 

It's fantastically opaque, especially at the beginning of each round, but you're helped by the fact that the card backs reveal what suit they are, so as play continues you get some vague sense of the who/why/when of it all. Joe won this narrowly on a points victory. 

Then we played Stomp the Plank! I think Joe won this too. And somewhere between Railways and here Joe also did his amazing card trick. Apologies Joe for making you do it twice. 

We finished off with a slightly boisterous So Clover, where apropos our immature clover graffitiing I told Chris I would rather see his penis than watch him do a poo, and Ian and I agreed that Joe would never write 'crush' for boot and stamp, even though Chris correctly deduced he would (and did). 

I didn't take photos of our Clovers but this was a very decent effort, with second attempts only needed twice and no misses at all: a more than respectable 20/24. Good going!

But it was now gone 11pm and time to wrap it up. Thanks all, a lot of fun.