From the Void to Mexico

Sunday, and Ian and I (Sam) snuck in a couple of games to draw the curtains on a wintry weekend. After its residency at work, Quantum had returned to my house and I knew Ian wouldn't object to me setting it up prior to his arrival. So I did, taking a standard 2-player set-up and adding the Quantum expansion of The Void, an empty tile of space. All it does is give you one research point for each ship you have in the void at the start of your turn, so it's kind of an interesting incentive rather than a whopping game-changer.

space bounty

I put down a quantum cube with my first move, but any danger of smugness evaporated quickly as Ian took me to the celestial cleaners, forcing me to go on the attack as he deftly put down cube after cube and shrugged off my aggression. My crappy early combat rolls certainly didn't help, but make no mistake, it was a pasting.

Ian - all cubes down
Sam - 2 cubes remaining

We fleetingly flirted with the idea of Eclipse before the setting-up time detoured us to the similarly loved Railways of the World. I haven't played this for a while but I got off to a pretty decent start, if I do say so myself. I managed to ship the first cube, get the first four cubes, and deliver the first three-link cube. At one stage I was in gravy, some 20 points or so ahead of Ian and with cash to burn.

service bounty

However the back-patting carries an inherent danger of hubris and Ian, pondering each move with a shrewd eye, got himself back into contention, clawing back the deficit to a paltry three points at one stage. Whilst I built and built (claiming all four route bonuses) Ian upgraded his train and shipped, shipped, shipped. Come the endgame, my larger network gave me plenty of options to score points, and also prevented Ian from completing his baron bonus- though it was still very close, considering:

Sam 117
Ian 107

And with that, Ian vanished into the night, never to be seen until Tuesday...