Host Joe talked us (me, Sam, Adam) through the rules. In this game, the point is to build railways across dales and through valleys in order to deliver stone and cheese and serve passengers. However, in doing so, you leave a trail of unprofitable railways behind you that you have to sell off to the local council. We played as we read the rules for each phase, which meant that we weren't really sure of our targets at each stage. And Adam wasn't yellow. That was really confusing.
At the end of round one, after much fiddly adjusting of counters on so many sliding scales it looked like something used to produce a Pink Floyd album, we found ourselves a quarter of the way into the game without much more of an idea about what to do next. I was in the lead, simply because I was lucky enough to choose the option that no one else chose. I went into the expensive valleys looking for stone, while the other three ran into each other on the plains, searching for cheese.
By the end of round two, people were glancing at the clock and thinking if we stopped now, we could play something else. And so it was that the game was curtailed, with me in a commanding lead, and the other three separated only by their railways companies' profitability.
Andrew 18
Joe 9 (profit -2)
Adam 9 (profit -3)
Sam 9 (profit -4)
I think I liked it, but I think I was in the minority. Maybe that's because I got a little bit of the board to myself. Or maybe I'm more forgiving of Martin Wallace's self-indulgance. To maintain the Pink Floyd theme, if Tinners' Trail is Dark Side of the Moon, and Brass is Wish You Were Here, then Last Train... is Ummagumma. The over-ambitious one that never quite fulfils its promise.
After this, we used Adam's Spin The Bottle app to chose between three games: Ticket to Ride, Seven Wonders or Downfall of Pompeii. It chose Pompeii, so we set it up and had a quick run through of the rules.
Then we set about populating a doomed city, mostly with our own relatives apparently, before Vesuvius erupted and we all panicked and ran to the exits. A sort of board game version of shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. Oh, what fun we had, sending our opponents' meeples into the tiny plastic volcano of doom while trying to guide our own meeples to safety. In the end, Sam was the winner, with the last three of us relying on the tie-breaker rule of "least dead".
1. Sam 8 survivors
2. Adam 7 survivors (6 dead)
3= Andrew 7 survivors (8 dead)
3= Joe 7 survivors (8 dead)
Ah, the thrill of a season's opening fixture! Only slightly dampened by Last Train's inscrutable opacity. Mmm, I like those words.
In the meantime, the tiny form table looks like this...
| Points | ||||||
| Andrew | 3 | 1 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 19 |
| Sam | 1 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 20 |
| Adam | 2 | 3 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 20 |
| Joe | 3 | 2 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 20 |
I didn't hate Nuremberg, it had an interesting, distinct take on the train game genre. In many ways, had the rulebook been better written it may not have turned us off - a passage at the beginning explaining the scoring would have guided our decisions in even that first turn; all goods and passengers score a vp, and sets of four score again at the end of the game.
ReplyDeleteThe structure of the game made it more difficult to get our heads around - you start with an auction, gaining influence in four tracks, the purpose of which becomes clear only later in the round. And the influence cubes you use for bidding are also vitally important later. As Sam said, it feels like playability has been sacrificed for theme, though actually I don't think it fits together very well thematically. The rulebook tells us we are railway promoters, and yet we are building track and shipping goods, hoping then to have our railways bought up by two larger networks.
Interestingly, the original Treefrog/Warforg edition of the game was criticised for it's awful graphic design and gaudy colouring; it does look pretty bad from pics on the geek, but I think they've gone too far the other way with this. The board is so busy once the cubes and passengers are seeded, the extraneous detail in the map gets lost.
Great to get Pompeii to the table again, and it really was the perfect fit for the time we had left - worth remembering. It's a game I always want to play again, feeling that I would have a much better strategy the second time round.
Adam and I both sort of wished we'd played Brass instead, though I was pleased we got two (1.5) games in. But Brass soon, eh?
I think the main negative on Wensleydale is just how fiddly moving all the counters around is. Having them stacked on top of each other in the influenceometers was just painful. A much bigger area for that part, with space to just slide counters up or down would be a big improvement.
ReplyDeleteAnd - like a less fun Tinners Trail - there was a lot of fiddly setup at the start which seems to be a Wallace theme...
Also it needs yellow counters.
Yes the fiddly-ness was a drag - interesting just how much that impacts on the experience.
ReplyDeleteI did hate it. Yet I woke up not hating it and being intrigued by it - and interested in trying it again, though perhaps as a 2-player rather than an evening-enveloping 4-hander.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I almost thought I'd be happy to play it again. But I can think of other games I'd prefer to play that scratch a similar itch, most of which we've already mentioned . . .
ReplyDeleteBut you have to admire a game where the victory points track goes all the way back to minus twenty.
ReplyDeleteYeah that's a real feature of Wallace games - Points can go down as well as up. Your victory is at risk if you do not continue to score points. Terms and conditions apply.
ReplyDelete