Game Day

Friday Dec. 28, 2007
I had the day off today, and Justin and Jason Easley came over to spend the day gaming. Justin wanted to show Jason Crokinole, so we started off with a couple games. Justin played Jason and then me, winning both games. Justin and I's game was pretty close and somewhat tense towards the end as we traded center shots. After cleaning up, I suggested we play a game of Race For the Galaxy. We started with random hands, which meant I had nothing extraordinary to start with. After a few cards were built, I named a 6 pointer that gave bonuses for alien worlds, so I aimed myself at trying to finish up that way. That seemed to pay out pretty well as I won this game 41-36-30 (me, Justin, Jason).
Next up, Justin picked Cuba. I have only heard that this is similar to PR, so I was interested to see if this was as good as advertised. The rules were pretty straight forward and we started playing. I made some poor choices and typically, was behind Jason in the actions I needed losing out to a lot of points. I finished well back of this one and Justin won easily, 81-76-64 (Justin, Jason, me). Its true, this is similar to PR in that there are roles, production, and shipping and selling of goods, but its sufficiently different in execution that its not a complete re-hash. Its too bad really, because this seems like a decent game - but I think this one will get the same amount of play due to PR-burnout. Its not really a 6-7 game, except that I probably wouldn't request it. I didn't dislike it, but I don't have any itch to play it again either.
After we finished, I checked the time and figured we'd better play Age of Steam, lest we fail to play it. I picked the Ireland map for us and set everything up, explaining the unique actions for the map. Starting out, I wanted to make sure and get at least one of the two red-blue sea-lanes (which I did) and hopefully one of the yellow lanes as well. As it turned out, I got both yellows. Jason built on the West side of the map while Justin went north and East. The first few rounds were expensive for me as I built up my southern/eastern empire knowing that the end game would likely bring me extra income from someone having to use my lines. Jason struggled and finally had to start giving me income in order to stay in the game. My infrastructure payed off as I started making money. Though I took out more shares than either Jason (who had far less than either Justin or I) or Justin, my ability to make large deliveries at the end and my network gave me a pretty good win 95-80-54 (me, Justin, Jason).
We had barely 20 minutes left, so I pulled out Tier Auf Tier to show the guys (since they both have small children too). This one is actually pretty decent fun for adults as a filler game, since there is a lot more placement strategy. Justin managed the only major fall of the game, but made a couple good placements to make up for it. I somehow manged to get rid of all my pieces for the win, despite having drank too much coffee today.