Tuesday April 25th - Stephensons Rocket

Stephensons-Rocket-1
Originally uploaded by coljen.

Down to 3 players again, Richard swanning off to France for some more skiing. Steve has just come back from BayCon and said the best game he had there was one of Stephensons Rocket. So we opted for that for tonights game. Garry and I had only played once before. I had picked up a shrink-wrapped copy at Essen 2004 for 10 euros. A buy I was well pleased with. Steve quickly ran through the rules to give us a refresher.
Basically there are 7 rail companies that you can expand by extending their track, the other players can veto the direction by spending their shares to move in another direction. If you match the shares with your own you carry on with your move. When 2 companies touch they merge into one. The game ends when there is only one company left or you run out of rail tiles. The winner is the one with the most money at the end of the game. You have 2 actions on your turn and it rapidly becomes nowhere near enough. There are always more things that you want to do. I thought I would concentrate on moving one company to start with and getting stations on the line. Picking up a few tokens along the way. Steve said the game was totally different from the one he played at BayCon, but that had 4 players and obviously that would make a difference. All too soon the rail tiles are in very short supply, signalling that the end of the game is pretty close and you realise that you haven't done half of what you had planned to do.
I seemed to have a pretty clear run and picked up a lot money during the game. In the end I won pretty comfortably which I was very surprised by.

Final Scores
Colin 100,000, Steve 65,000, Garry 53,000

As we had some time left we finished off the evening with a game of Don, a 2001 Queen game designed by Michael Schacht. This is an auction game to purchase cards of different colours. There are 6 colours numbered 0-9. You have a number of chips to start and after you have won a card you are not permitted to bid the number on the card. If the winning bid is a number of a card held by another player they get all the money. If more than one it's split. This interesting mechanic makes for some amusing play as the numbers you can actually bid diminish the more cards you are successful in getting. Steve had picked up his copy for £2 at BayCon. A good £2 worth I should say.

Final Scores
Steve 22, Colin 21, Garry 19