While we were waiting for everyone to show up, Adam dealt out a hand of mini-bridge. I was the chosen one with 12 points. When I look at the dummy’s hand, I was depressed. In the dummy’s strongest suit, I had no cards. And in my strongest suit, the dummy had one King. So I chose eight Spades. Sadly, I did not make it and was off by one. Apparently, I needed to let Adam (sitting on my right) win a trick. He would take one more and then play a card that I would win.
Mike has not played this classic game and I have not played it in a long time. So we brought it out. The first payout caught Doug at a disadvantage since everyone else had two trains out and he only had one. The next one caught me by surprise. I did not get a chance to put my Union Pacific shares out in time. Fortunately, no one else did either. I was also lucky in not fighting other people for control in my shares. So I jumped out in the lead. At the end of the game, Adam was able to just catch up. But not by enough. I won by one share.
For our meaty game of the night, we broke out Age of Steam. With five players, we tried searching for a map that was designed for 5. We didn’t find any new maps, so we just picked one and went for it. And that turned out to be Disco Inferno. Which might be a mistake with Mike-Pod playing.
As it was a new map, none of us had any experience with the strategy required for this board. The map is broken into three areas (Hell, Earth, and Heaven). Six cubes of each color are placed on cities in Hell. The goal is to transport them to the corresponding cities in Earth. And the game will move to phase two when at least twenty have been transported. At that point, all tracks leading to Hell will be removed (giving players 1/3 of an income point). Hell will be removed, flipped over, and placed above Earth as Heaven. Now, there are only two turns to transport the souls to Heaven!
We started out with $20 dollars. Most people took three extra shares while Mike and I took two. Bidding was intense. And I thought it went far too high. But I won the start player with ten dollars and chose Locomotive. Adam chose first build and fortunately he did not build where I had wanted to go. Jon was amusing. He had chosen first move. So his goal was to hose someone who had already built. With my level 2 locomotive, Jon chose to avoid going after me. Instead, he went after Adam. Which hurt both of them badly. But, over the course of the game, Jon hurt himself the most and ended the game with a score close to zero.
By the time that we realized the important aspects of this map, I had built my tracks pretty well in that regard. We figured out that after the cubes are delivered to Earth, their next stop is Heaven. So you want to control the routes upwards to Heaven.
With the ability to build six hexes each turn, you can lay a lot of track. Doug made a surprising first build by laying track from Kool to Domus and effectively cutting off 3rd Rock. Which meant that not a lot of purples were delivered there. Sigh. Fortunately, there were six black cubes on Earth and a lot of cubes of Domus and Masse.
Doug was able to make strides in the mid-game. And pull out into the lead. But I had better connections to Heaven and was able to catch up at the end. So it came down to who had layed the most track which turned out to be me.
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