Back on July 3rd we got together and played Sentinels of the Multiverse with Ben and Owen. Mike and I really like this game. Mike used the Sentinels app on his phone to randomly generate the Villain, Environment, and Heroes we would be playing with.
The first game was brutal…for us, the heroes. The environment was extremely harsh and we were constantly battling it more than the villain. We were doomed and we knew it. The villain beat us…badly.
The next game went quite differently. Ben played a superhero whose powers could deal with nasty environmental surprises along with handily taking care of the villain’s cohorts. I don’t want to make it seem like Ben’s character won the day for us. It was a team effort. I only point out Ben’s involvement because he was actually helpful. The superhero team won. Then we destroyed a large metropolitan city.
July 4th is Mike Byrd’s birthday. The entire country celebrates it. We took this opportunity to meet at Mike’s house and play a few games. (Evil Mike missed this one. He was at the Lakes.)
Ben brought along a new train game called Railways through Time. The game has the same general rules as Railway Tycoon (and all of the spinoffs.) The boards for each time period are small, containing only 5 to 8 cities at best. BUT you can run track into the various time warp hexes and emerge in any other time warp hex in any other time zone. This forces your strategy for delivering cubes to be a lot different from the other versions of the game. During setup, you get to pick which boards you want to use during the game. You get one more board than there are players. There are also new railroad operation cards specifically for the time periods.
Our first game found us struggling to get use to the whole travel-through-time-to-different-boards mechanic. Or as Ben put it, “thinking 4th dimensionally.†I thought I might do well in this game thinking forth dimensionally. I usually do terrible in the other versions. I didn’t do too badly. Owen ended up winning with 48 points. I was second with 46. Ben was a close third at 44 points. Mike, who is the reigning King of the Rails in the other versions, struggled through the game and ended up with just 26 points. It only took us two hours to play the game. So we played another…
This one went a little differently. For one, Mike was back as King of the Rails. Also, with the shipment of a single goods cube, I claimed four operation bounty cards. (Owen applauded my strategy. To which I had to confess I only knew about one of the cards.) Mike won this game with 55 points. I came in second again with 52. Owen was third with 50 points. Ben was distracted by squirrels and flashy objects and only got 39 points.
We still had some time before I needed to leave, so Mike got out a little game called Merchants. For a small game in a small box it was a lot of fun. Each player is a merchant who is buying, shipping, and selling goods to make money. Money wins you the game. You can also buy more ships and various other upgrades that help you along in the game, but those upgrades are limited. Surprisingly, to me at least, I won this game with 41 points. Ben had 37 and Owen had 35. Mike was distracted by squirrels and flashy objects and only got 23 points. (Those squirrels may have been his kids. Hard to tell, I was concentrating on the game.)
Chaos Steve