Wednesday Night Gaming

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After a great night of gaming, here were the results:

Waterloo

Mike and I kicked off the night with a second go at a learning game of Waterloo, Martin Wallace’s latest release in the Treefrog line of games. I have been tremendously impressed with all of these offerings so far, but I have yet to be convinced about this game. I have no doubt that it is a decent game, but I do doubt my ultimate ability to understand how to play it. We have, however, started to get a decent grasp of how the rules work, even if I continue to forget about area unit restrictions. We managed to make it through 3 turns last night and I suspect that both of us will attempt to give it another go sometime soon before setting aside the necessary time slot to actually get a full game in.

Lokomotive Werks

This is now my fourth game of Lokomotive Werks and it’s last night as the Game of the Month. I have yet to pick next months game, but it will likely be Pampas Railroads. The other possibility is to enter into a sort of yearly rehash of prior games, hitting up some of the favorites: Tinners’ Trail, Steel Driver, Liberte, etc. But, without further ado, here is the session report.

The game started off very slow for me. The L1 Green Lokomotive paid off well in the first round, and going last in turn order, I bumped up production to 6 units. Both Mike and Dan upgraded to the next level factory. The next 2 or 3 rounds, however, did not go good for me and the dice rolls allowed me to only sell 1 train each turn. This set me back tremendously, and I fear that I never completely recovered. I know that my mistake was to over-invest by upping the factory to 6 trains. None of us every fully allowed anyone else to get away with singular investment in a factory, but this actually may have led to quicker factory development and obsolescence that we experienced in last weeks game. In the end, Dan was able to carry an early lead to a commanding victory. I believe that I had around $190, Mike had something close to that, and Dan obviously won with around $320.

Land Unter

This is the second time that I have played this simultaneous trick-taking game with three (I have only played it with 3) and it is either going to hit the trade pile or I am going to play it with more than three and actually like it. As it stands, it seems overly chaotic and I feel like I have no control over my play. Honestly, I am no good at any trick-taking games, but there are ones that I fully enjoy and can at least see my mistake after making the play. I do believe that this one will be better with 4 or 5 players and I may carry it along with me to Origins and try to give it a go.

Bunte Vogel

With the help of some very kind individuals on BGG, I was finally able to get an English translation of this game and I got it to the table last night for the first time (with three players). I have actually played two “learning” games with 2 players using imaginary rules, but it is a 3 or 4 player game so it was good to play by the real rules. Basically, you collect sets of bird cards during the round and store as many of the same kind as you kind at the end of one of the rounds. Chaos is introduced to the game through the roll of a die which can force you to pass cards to other players or draw cards from player’s hands. If the game could be easily played in 20 minutes, it would be great fun. But that will take a concerted effort from all players, and I am not sure if it will often happen. The end of the game is triggered by the end of the deck and the deck of cards is a bit too large. Either way though, it was fun last night and we had a silly good time mispronouncing the names of the birds and the “dicker hund.”