Date: 6th March 2015
Game played: Spike ( R&R Games ) BGG Id: 165876

By some twist of fate, there ended up being just three of us this week so the planned session of Long Shot got pushed to one side. Instead we decided to try Spike, a game I tried at Essen but haven't played since. This is the reason I'm giving for horribly mashing up the rules. For some reason, I mistakenly recalled the free movement was just one space and the locomotive-powered movement was a further action choice. As a result, the game was taking longer than it should as we were using more actions to move our trains than we needed to, thus not doing other things as much as we could. I also wasn't clear enough in emphasising that each good could only be shipped once as Steve was well into his second shipment of the same good before we spotted the error.

Anyway, the game is about developing the rail network in the United States, with each player having a secret objective of connecting up to various cities. You build routes by collecting cards and cashing in sets of these to lay track, like Ticket to Ride. You are also shipping different types of goods between cities for a payout. At the same time you can upgrade your rail stock to help you do things more efficiently. The game ends once you've been through the card deck three times (with the exact finish point determined by three end-game cards inserted into the bottom half of the deck during the third card shuffle). We all thought the game played pretty well but realised things would have moved along quicker if we'd used the correct rules. We did think, component-wise, the track pieces were very small and fiddly and moving the trains on them also fiddly. However, the rest of the game was nicely produced. Steve and I were neck and neck at the end but I managed to end the game before he could rack up any more points. We both scored maximum bonuses for our city links, whereas Mark K had abandoned this objective, having been cut off from the North East by the other two of us, so he knew he wasn't likely to win. As it was, I managed to scrape the win by just two points.

 
Player
Rating
Score
Position
Winner
Garry
7
80
1
Steve
7
78
2
Mark K
7
70
3

(c) 2001-2024 Garry Lloyd | | admin