Thursday Night Age of Steam

I invited Nathan over for a little gaming Thursday night. We were figuring out what to play (while at work), and Nathan sounded like he wanted to learn Age of Steam (which is fine by me, being my favorite game). So, I shot Dion Garner a line to see if he'd be interested in joining us. He was able to join us and also invited his neighbor Morgan Burt. Dion has played AoS before, but not often and not in a while. Morgan had played Railroad Tycoon, but not AoS. So after explaining the rules I pulled out the original rust belt map and off we went. Well, I started building first, using engineer to connect two cities through a town near the west-central part of the map. Morgan grabbed the SW and Dion the NW. Nathan played on the east coast all by himself. Of course that meant it only took until turn two for Morgan to screw me over. I had to adjust my plans a bit, and by the time I was ready to seriously move longer goods, I was leading the share race by 3-4 shares. Those extra shares took me right out of the game. Dion had never found any good routes, and didn't move many long ones at all. In the last round, Morgan managed to move to 6-routes and won. Morgan:83, Nathan:79, Charles: 75, Dion: 40
We had a little time left and looking for something short, I pulled out my new present from Secret Santa (thanks) - Ubongo Extrem. This is a little timed puzzle game where each player gets a different puzzle shape each round and has to fit 3-4 pieces onto the shape the fastest. It differs from the original Ubongo in that the pieces are built from hexagons rather than squares. Sometimes the puzzles are really easy and you can get them done in 10 seconds. We also had a number of them where we all cried uncle and threw the pieces back in the pot. There is a little bit of luck involved in the scoring, but the scores were tight and I'll happily claim the win. Charles: 30, Nathan:26, Dion 29, Morgan: 27