A Sol with a deadly weapon

Except there aren’t any deadly weapons in Sol, the new game that Ian, Sam and I tackled yesterday evening. This is a fairly simple strategy where you have to... well, I’m still not sure. Keep a dying sun alive by putting energy into it? Something like that. Use your ships to build stations that give you energy, allow you transmit energy or let you build more ships.

We set off just fine. Ian even had a thematically linked beer, a lovely bottle of Sol. But something just wasn’t working. It felt like three games of solitaire on the same board. The rules allow each player to use other players’ stations, but I couldn’t see a reason to.

Then I asked if our motherships, stationed furthest from the sun where all our ships are launched, are supposed to move? I noticed all these arrows on the board going in an anticlockwise direction and thought they might mean something. Sam checked the rules. Indeed, our motherships are supposed to orbit the sun.

Now the game made more sense, and was a lot more enjoyable as a result. We needed to plan ahead a little bit more this time. However, Sam had to delete the tweet of us playing the game since it was the kind of mistake that is clearly visible from looking at the board.

Spot the mistake

As for the score, I went from not scoring any halfway through the game to suddenly leaping up the track and squeaked a win just as the sun finally died.

Andrew 22ish
Sam 21ish
Ian 18ish

What the game would look like on a real sun

After this it was still only about nine o’clock so we felt there was another big game in us. We went for an old familiar: Tinners’ Trail.

We began like greyhounds out of the traps, with iron and copper both at their highest possible prices in round one. Then, in round two, they collapsed to their lowest. This meant, as round three dawned, there were still a lot of cubes on the board.

Sam went for trains, Ian went for adits, I went for boats, I think. Anyway, it was a close game under difficult circumstances.

Ian 89 (plus 4 cash)
Sam 89 (no cash)
Andrew 83

Next we played Spy Tricks. I fell into last place with no correct guesses in round one and I stayed there, unable to make by Double Agent piece work in my favour. Sam played us all for fools with his clever reaction to Ian’s guess of red five (“I don’t like how quickly you did that”) despite him having the red five in his hand. Ian’s unerring eye for the missing card won through in the end, though.

Ian 22
Sam 19
Andrew 5

Finally, after all that astrophysics, mining and espionage, we had to get a letter to the princess! Yes, we finished on Love Letter. I ran into a 2-0-0 lead. Then Sam brought it back to 2-2-0 before Ian staged a comeback. It was 2-2-2 and Sam won in the final round, meaning we all won at least one game tonight.

Love Letter's version of dead man's hand.

Sam 3
Andrew 2
Ian 2

Cheers for hosting, Sam, and see you all soon.