Game Night Report for January 5, 2007

by Susan Rozmiarek

Tonight was the third official meeting of the The Central Texas Boardgames Meetup Group. We had about 21 people show up, our best attendance yet. A lot of them were new, but there were a few repeats from the previous month. Hopefully this trend will continue.

 

On the Underground

I definitely have to check out any new train games so I jumped at the chance to try this game. It plays on the map of the London's subway system and each player gets to develop two different rail lines. There are two basic ways to score points that are often at odds with each other. One is by connecting to certain places and the other is by having the passenger travel over your lines. Players get four actions on their turn which will mostly be used to add track to the ends of their lines but also to get tokens that allow lines to branch. At the end of each player turn, the passenger will move to one or two of the stations depicted on four upturned cards. The rules for movement are slightly difficult to grasp at first but it helps to think of the passenger as being lazy. He wants to walk and change lines as little as possible. Predicting his movement and building your lines for future movement is the most interesting thing about the game, I thought. I think Ticket to Ride: Märklin does the whole thing a bit better, but On the Underground may have just enough of a unique twist to make it getting.

Factory Fun

Ah, puzzle-y goodness that I got to play twice today, once at lunch and then again tonight. I knew that I wanted this game based on the description alone. Players are building their own individual factory with various machines. Each machine requires a certain input of goods and then produces a particular good. The goods are various colors of goo and you get starting reservoirs of each. Machines are of varying monetary value. The idea is to place the machines in the factory so that they work together in chains with the output of one going into the input of another. There is a very big spatial element here as you want to be as efficient as possible. Things can be rearranged and pipes can be utilized to help but it is costly. To make it even more challenging, machines tiles are acquired in a frenzied, grabbing free-for-all manner. In each round, players simultaneously flip over one tile apiece and then everyone tries to be the first to grab the one that they want. It is very costly to toss a tile that you can't place so you have to know what you need and be able to spot and grab it quickly. I not a big fan of speed games but here in a small dose it was fun. Very fun. Several times I grabbed a tile that I thought I wanted only to discover the inputs were orientated the wrong way for me to use it. Arghh! The game was quite enjoyable both times and of the rare type that I want to play again immediately to see if I can do better.

We ended the evening with a quick game of Poison, which was a nice, light closer after the previous brain-burner.

You can see a list of games played and a few pictures here.

Posted by Susan Rozmiarek at January 8, 2007 4:41 PM