What I Played Today: February 7

1830, Dominion: Intrigue

Today I played my first train game, 1830. I played with a guy from the store and a few of his friends, and the experience was very different that my usual group, but I managed well enough. The game itself was a DIY project, which looked really good that I assumed it was the professional version.

The game itself involves less to do with trains and more to do with manipulating the stock market and controlling what stocks you have. There are eight main companies that can do well depending if you continue to pay dividends, or save money to increase the resources of the company. Each company gets to expand what tracks they have, and try to increase the value of their stocks...or try to crash a company so that it you can steal from its resources, although I couldn’t figure out how.

The game got away with me, as I spent too much money in the beginning so I couldn’t get a company off the ground at the start. The host pretty much knew what he was doing so he ran away with the game, and the player next to me lost interest early and so it took some effort keeping morale up. It did seem interesting, although there was a lot of the game that didn’t make much sense to me.

For example, the board is dominated with a map of the Northeast, with various cities and rivers, and each company had a starting area, but they were all bunched together and pretty obscure. There were a lot of little rules that make sense in a simulation context, but mainly existed to make the game difficult to follow. How you create routes for the railroads is fun and crunchy, but damn unnecessary, and I know this kind of game has a long history, but I could imagine a much more streamlined stock market manipulation game is possible. I guess I’ll have to try again...I’m signed up to play a different version of this game a few weeks from now, so hopefully I’ll like that one better.

After the game wound down, I went off to a Super Bowl party and watched the end of the game, and then played a couple of games of Dominion with the others. Let me say this; I play Dominion a lot. I like Dominion quite a bit; it’s simple but complicated, it’s got just the right amount of luck and strategy, and I enjoy playing pretty much every time, unless someone slows the game down too much with overly-long combos. That said, I play Dominion a lot, and while the honeymoon isn’t over, I can’t wait until there are more cards available. The last five or so games I’ve played have all been from Intrigue, which has good interaction, but man have I been hit by a torturer too many times to count.

I also wish that the strategy I’ve internalized wasn’t so effective, mainly by trashing terrible cards to get them out of the deck. Having a small deck to make sure you’re always drawing the cards you want each turn works great, and it’s only ever messed up when a particular interaction card gets in the way. Probably the best card of this strategy is Seaside’s Island, which lets you get two cards out of your deck, but still bring them back, so you still get the effects of the victory points without having to keep them in your deck. Islands usually sell out fast for this reason. I’ll just keep trying new strategies until I find one that works just as well.