When I get to play The Great Zimbabwe, Trains and Love Letter on the same day, I don’t complain.
I still can’t win The Great Zimbabwe, though. This time I got the Builder + Gu combo and built some craftsmen, but it didn’t work out well. On the other hand, I did make good money with my craftsmen, so that was good.
The winner of our three-player game kept his VR low, that was the key. We were able to delay things by building secondary craftsmen, but that didn’t help. Enthusiastic.
Trains was a second playtest of my Tampere map. Last time the map was badly missing some station locations, so I increased the city density closer to what it is on other maps. Now it all worked quite well, and the map felt quite balanced too, there were no places that are obviously the best place to play.
We also had a decent mix of cards, so it was quite an interesting game. In the end my weakest board position wasn’t enough to win the game and I was dead last. The winner had a rather impressive track network. Enthusiastic.
To wrap up the evening, I gave the guys a choice between Love Letter and The City. They chose Love Letter – for me it was a pure win-win situation.
What a good game we had, too! I got a strong start, Hannu did quite well, too, so the scores were soon 4-3-0. However, as seems to be the usual case, the third guy picked up the pace a bit, and eventually we ended up at 4-4-4 – the first player to five points wins the game, so it was as close as possible.
Fortunately I was then able to secure the victory, so my promising start didn’t go to waste and I could go home happy for winning at least something.
Love Letter scores Suggest, almost Enthusiastic. It is a rather brilliant design, the way the cards interact with each other in many ways. It’s an excellent filler.