11th May 2024 - Tramways

• Recent games

Most importantly, I made it to the club this week. It turns out that bringing up a baby and playing board games on Thursday nights are not particularly compatible pursuits. But then Karen told me that it had kept her away for 3 years, so I'm doing quite well by comparison. Last time I was at the club was playing Age Of Steam in the tournament in May. It's only a matter of time.

As it turned out, that last visit prepared me nicely for Tramways, which shares a lot of common elements with Age Of Steam, including bidding for turn order. Only in Tramways, the auction mechanism is far more vicious. And there's a few other mechanics that add up to make this much more of a brain melter.

I've never really known where I sit in the club rankings for taking a long time over your turn. Probably not the quickest, according to David-E's feedback at least. But it turns out that having a baby teaches you to use your time much more efficiently - so hopefully I was vying with Claire to be quickest at taking my turns in this game. That was otherwise a fairly open goal, due to the aforementioned brain melting. I hope I wasn't too impatient with the others - no doubt in due course I will rejoin Karen and the rest of the long-turn-taking elite. One way and another, it is a matter of time.

I see from the archives that I have done a write-up for this game before, back in February 2023. Back then I didn't sound too keen on it, but it has definitely grown on me since then. Becoming more familiar with the game doesn't make it any easier, but it does give it a kind of structure that isn't there to begin with. So now I can enjoy the quirks of this game, and all the more while others around me are being floored by them.

For all that, I think my most effective move in the whole game was to point out a misreading of the rules which resulted in me going first in the initial turn order, rather than last. Four and a half hours later, the final positions in this 5-player game were the same as the initial turn order. Coincidence? Or maybe I had nicked the win from Claire who originally drew first player, and all the complexity in the meantime was just for show.

Speaking of games where turn order is important, I saw we had Kemet back for the first time in a while. That is another game that took a while to grow on me - once I understood it was less of a war game, more a game about being in last place at the right time, I got to like it. If it weren't for Tramways I'd definitely have played that again. Also this week were Nova Roma and Betrayal At House On The Hill.

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