I Still Have No Gift For Strategy

I usually don't mind winter weather, except when I'm driving. I spent yesterday up at my friends' lovely home playing games, and all was good. The drive back home this morning was severely lacking in "good", at least for the first half of the trip. Never a good thing when there seems to be enough water on the road for me to start hydroplaning. At least that didn't last long, but a nerve-wracking couple of minutes, I tells ya.

But we aren't here to talk of weather, at least I'm not anymore. You might still want to talk about weather, and that's cool, I guess, just wait until I get done talking about games, if you would. I got my first real look at the XBox 360, and it was OK, I guess. The ability to download demos or or movie trailers, or get actual movies through it appeals to the part of me that enjoys devices that can serve multiple purposes. But it didn't instill me with a burning desire to go get one.

I played Halo 3 for the first time. Despite being a fan of first-person shooters, I'm not a big Halo fan. My introduction was playing Halo on multiplayer with a bunch of guys that were all quite good, and I wasn't even sure how to use the controller. The frequent dying tends to skew my opinion, I think, though tearing around in the Warthog was fun, and Halo did give us the online series Red vs. Blue, which I loved dearly, so mixed bag. Still, it was a little odd that with Papafred's massive TV screen, the game didn't try and fill it all, and on split-screen that left it a little hard for me to make things out. But co-op play was nice for the few levels we went through, so there's that.

More interesting was the board game of the night, one Railroad Tycoon. Your objective is to build railroads between cities in the eastern U.S. (the board stops around Kansas City), and then ship colored cubes to cities that are the same color, the more cities you can make it through for the delivery, the more points you get, though you have to spend money to upgrade your train to go through more than one city. Level 1 train can go to 1 city, level 2 can go through 2, 3 through 3, up to Level 8 apparently, though we didn't get past six. Within a "turn", there are three rounds, where each player can make one action each rounds, and there are several choices for actions. You can build up to four squares worth of track, or ship goods, or urbanize a city, or pick up a card, or pay to have new cubes placed in a city. If you need money, you can get a $5,000 share, which you'll have to pay $1,000 on each round, and you lose a point for each share at the end of the game, but if you've got enough points, it won't be a concern.

When all cubes are shipped from a city, it becomes empty, and when there are fourteen empty cities, there's just one more "turn" to go before the end of the game. That was the key to Bess' eventual victory. He upgraded his train a lot early in the game, built up a continuous line through several cities, then late in the game began racking up points by making six-city shipments (netting him six points each time), and that basically enabled him to blow the rest of us out of the water. Papafred and I were the lowest two, as neither one of us seems particularly gifted at planning out longterm strategies. I actually did, at one point, have about three turns worth of moves planned out, and managed all the moves, they just weren't particularly good moves. Word to the wise: you probably won't win if you try and stick to making lots of shipments over short distances, say one or two-link trips. That was mine and Papafred's approach, and like I said, it didn't work out so great.

It's a fun game, but you'll need to set aside a few hours, especially the first time through. It can take players awhile to decide what to do when they haven't any past experience to work from.