Josh's private Roads & Boats session. 4-player Roads & Boats.
Players were Josh, Mark, Lewis, myself. New players to the game were: Josh, Mark, Lewis, myself.
We spent 40 minutes going over the rules and setting up the game.
Click here for an overview of Roads & Boats.
Josh organized a session of this game anticipating a monster game. He set up the game ahead of time, so my setup and rules review is really about going over the rules, and having a sample first turn which turned out to be the real first turn.
Josh set up a scenario in which pairs of players were separated by water, and mountains and deserts were islands in the water.
We were fairly clueless about the implications and interactions going into this game.
There wasn't much conflict in the game. Not that there's any way to be an aggressor, but one can go over to a player's hard-earned buildings and use them. One could even take excess resources from another player's resource producers. But mostly, we all kept to ourselves, and churned away.
The game ended with us anticipating more turns. I just built enough bricks in the wonder (which acts as a timing device for the game) to push us that much closer. I didn't think I could do better given more time, so I wanted to hurry things along.
I thought I was doing well, but Josh was way ahead of everyone, having created a mint and a stock market, and collected some gold to push through them. The rest of us were still depleting our mines, and I was the only one who went so far as to build a mint.
The game ended earlier than any of us anticipated. I think Josh could have scored even more if he had anticipated that.
Overall, I found the game satisfying, though, without any strain on our resources, the game was more of a race to see who could most efficiently build buildings and recover resources before the wonder is built. It had a solitaire feel, and I think the only reason anyone did anything aggressive was to break the monotony. I wonder how the game would play out with an asymmetrical layout.
Game lasted 182 minutes.
Final scores were:
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