GameCrew Meeting #1
Gary, Chris, Cheryl and I met this past Saturday to open the 2006 season of gaming. This year, we’re going to try to schedule specific times to meet and play games and socialize. Hopefully, this’ll mean that we’ll see each other more than 6 times a year.
The first session featured the boardgame, Empire Builder. Empire Builder is a railroad building game, published by Mayfair Games, set on the North American continent. Players build rail networks between cities by spending money and drawing their rail networks on the board between printed mileposts. As cities are connected, goods can be shipped by rail from the goods producing cities to the demand cities. Each successful shipment gives the player money, which then can be used to build rail. More rail opens up more markets.
As this was our first time playing, though most of us had played similar games some years ago, this was an open learning game. As such, it took us close to 6 hours to play and we’d barely scratched the surface. The victory conditions stipulate that, to win, a player must connect 6 of the 7 major cities with their rail network and have 250 million dollars. By the time we’d finished, 3 of us had 6 cities connected, but were short of cash. Gary was in the lead with 80 or so million, while I had close to 70.
All players agreed that it was a great game and will be played at the next session as well.
Over the past few meetings, we’ve been spending time learning new games. As learning a new game takes a lot of time out of each session, it was agreed that, after learning a new game, we should play the new game over several sessions before learning yet another new game. So, Empire Builder will probably be on the table quite a bit in the coming months.
The current GameCrew schedule will most likely be the 2nd Sunday of every month. I can’t wait for the next one.