Rail Games

[cherydactyl]

A week ago, I took a mental health day and went to Michicon. I made illyaa deal with both kids' soccer games, and my parents, who came to one of them, to boot. Actually, he volunteered to let me go. I left about 7:15 am, got to Troy about 8:05, had time to go get water and pumpkin seeds at the nearby drug store, and still get there quite early.

There were maybe 125 to 150 people in the room at the peak. We had around 15 people for the Puffing Billy (train games) tournament, many of whom I have known for many years but only see a few times per year. I got to play the playtest copy of Africa Rails. I blew some newbies out of the water at Ticket To Ride Europe; I am a bit of a shark since I am ranked in the top 50 at the online game which has an international list of tens of thousands of players. I felt kind of bad about beating them so badly at that, but they will learn it quicker than if I try to play badly. I played Eurorails with Al, had an unfortunately-large pickup game of Express, but didn't get to play Lunar Rails.

John mentioned the idea of a Mars Rails, loosely based on Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom. He mentioned Space 1889 (the victorian space travel game) as a good resource for such a project. I thoroughly agreed that that would be a fun project. I mentioned that I have a full set of John Carter of Mars paperbacks. Al encouraged John and I to collaborate on such a thing.

As we came up to the 7 pm event slot, John and I were neck and neck, so Al made us play on the same board of India Rails. It ended up 252-220-220, with the win for John. I missed a PB championship, albeit a small-time one, by this much. Got second place and a Mayfair gift certificate.

Got home at just about 11 pm. The venue didn't allow smoking, but plenty of the people I played with are smokers, so I still smelled of it. I took a shower to wash the smoke out of my hair.

Comments

[eviljohn.livejournal.com]

Yep, I've played a few of them. The thing that's kept me away from most of the rail games and more towards the German games has been the play time and teaching time. -- I do know that if everyone has knows the rules and played before it can go pretty quickly, but in general with the folks we play with there's always at least one person we have to teach rules to. So that means those type of games are generally too long for us, plus if one or more people are analysis-paralysis types (unfortunately we have a few) it can go *painfully* slow.

But saying that I like a lot of the rail games (and play TTR, Santa Fe, Union Pacific, etc. as much as I can), it's just the learning curve that hold us back from Lunar Rails, etc.