The Mine Shaft Gap

Up until late last year, like many others, I was not expecting the Australian Games Expo (AGE) to be running until June. But it came to pass that apparently for financial risk-related reasons the organisers of AGE decided to merge, or more correctly, co-locate the event with the long-running Cancon.
I remember going to Cancon a few times back in the late eighties and early nineties, when it was primarily a gathering of role-players, maybe with a few big counter-based wargames and/or some WWII miniatures off in a corner somewhere. ‘Family-friendly’ boardgames and anything resembling a Euro were not seen. (At least, that’s how I remember Cancon, although I’ll acknowledge that my memory may be a distortion of the reality…)
Things have changed since then. If there was any role-playing, it was nowhere to be seen. Instead the exhibition hall was crammed with tables covered with all manner of combat terrain, troops and armory, from ancient DBA/DBM, more recent WWI & II, and the fantasy of LOTR and WarHammer. There was also a large section dedicated to a Blood Bowl tournament, with our own Brad and Tommy taking part.
The late addition of the AGE apparently expanded the whole site of Cancon a little, with disjointed areas for exhibitor booths and another large room for some open gaming (not much) and the Settlers and Carcassonne tournaments. There was a Yu-Gi-Oh and some other tournament in this room as well, which were apparently associated with Cancon and not AGE.

Before proceeding further, I should acknowledge the picture contributions here. Mine are the one above of the Cancon floor and those below with the kids. But all other pics here were taken by Brian and I thank him for his contribution! The source of his set is here at flickr.com.

Canberra + gaming also presented the opportunity for catching up with old friends, namely Ed V., Ken F., and Mike K. It was good to get in a few games too, although when Mike turned up, Alex and I were standing in line for a fast cafeteria lunch of questionable nutritional value. After the exchange of initial pleasantries, Mikey joined us for lunch - “I came for the food,” he declared. Apparently Kransky trumps Kriegsspiele …

Both Brian and Ed entered the Settlers tournament - some of Brian’s pics here show his participation - unfortunately, after four heats, neither were lucky enough to make the semi-final rounds. However, for years to come no doubt, there will be reference to and reflection on the infamous “Settlers incident of ‘09″ arising during that tournament. I shall not describe the details here, except to say that it demonstrated unfortunately that mature behaviour cannot always be assumed from all participants in our hobby, especially when there is a perception of high stakes (ie., a trip to Germany for the tournament champion).

Much of our Canberra weekend was concerned with accommodating and entertaining children. In the games arena for us, that included first up a Pokemon miniatures combat thing. Our ‘host’ was the delightful Lucy, who I suspect was no more than a year or so older than our Mr. 6. She explained the game to him and me, before successfully dispatching our Pokemon team to the tanks in a cool 15 mins. The novelty of this game is the components - collectible figures that spin on bases as a proxy for attack and defense die rolls. Despite being a Pokemon fan, and also that Lucy very generously allowed him to take one of the figures away with him, Mr. 6 was not all that enamoured with this.
Later games included the simple but attractive Fruttirelli, and also Aquaretto, although Mr. 6 tends to get distracted and lose concentration when he plays this. The real surprise for me was Mr. 4, who sat happily for a good 30-60 mins with Make ‘n’ Break on Saturday and over an hour with aMAZEing Labyrinth on Sunday. He needed some minimal supervision for both of these sessions, and was only playing with the components for the most part, but both held his interest for far longer than I expected.

Most of the gaming for grown-ups took place after hours at the ‘Tradies’, but there were I few I could join in during the day. Here are some of the highlights:

Notre Dame: Alex, Brian and I were positioned for strong performances given this had not been played before by Ed or Mikey.
15 mins rules & setup; 51 mins game time.
Results: Alex (yellow): 73. Paul (green): 62. Brian (blue): 48. Mike (purple): 44. Ed (red): 40.

Eketorp: A new title with the Queen Games logo, although I’m sure I picked this off the Rio Grande stand. (Update: After just looking this up on BGG I see that the publication date is 2002, so really not new. However, I believe none of our group here had ever seen or heard of this before…)
I picked this to play based on the Viking theme, as a nod to the rarely-seen Ken, an enthusiast of Viking lore.
In this game players compete for different value ‘bricks’ to build up to 15 segments of wall around their castle. In a 4p game we get 6 veeples (Viking meeples) each, which are secretly allocated to brick-producing spaces, attacking other people’s castles, and/or defending your own castle. Where there is no competition for bricks, you take them home for free. However, if you clash with an opponent in a brick field or at a castle, then one or both of your veeples will ‘die’ in a simple combat card mechanism. Actually your defeated veeples are sent to a ‘field hospital’ and will recycle back to you after a few turns. The game ends when someone has acquired 15 bricks or, as we found, after a fixed number of turns (10?).
The first turn produced amusing results and set the tone for the whole game. Competition and combat was intense, with what seemed to be about half of everyone’s veeple stock sent to the field hospital tanks. Although the simpler strategy may have been to go for the lower-value-lower-risk field bricks, we were to have none, or very little of that. Actually, I did finesse a few bricks this way, but let’s face it, this game is about flighting, and that’s the way we played it!
AGE is a great place to try before you buy (you can do both!) and certainly I was glad to try this and would even play it again. But one playing was enough to confirm for me that I don’t need to buy this one…
25 mins rules and setup; 60 mins game play.
Results: Ken (Triberga; yellow): 27. Paul (Ismantorp; purple): 24. Alex (Graborg; white): 23. Mike (Eketorp; red): 14.

Oriente: A (new to us) card game presented by Ed. This was as yet unplayed, and a briefing of the rules left us scratching our heads as to how it would play out. In fact, several turns of play still left us scratching our heads (or maybe it was just me?). This is a strange game that plays like nothing else I can think of, and maybe takes a bit of getting used to. However, my impression is that your character card at any given time (this can change from one turn to the next) simply determines the action you take and therefore the choices made do not seem that interesting (just confusing!).
Would I give it another chance? Maybe. But I wouldn’t be jumping all over it…
20 mins rules and setup; 47 mins game time.
Results: Paul: 27. Ed: 24. Brian: 21. Richard: 15 (Mike [retired]: 9).

Night gaming at the Tradies for me led off with Red November, a 2-8 player co-operative game explained to us by Giles. We are crew members on a Russian ‘gnomish’ submarine, besieged by various perils such as water leaks and flooding, fires, oxygen pump failure, etc., and even an attack by the great Kraken. The neat novelty is how the game time advance mechanism (like Thebes and/or Around the World in 80 Days) is used, to give players a feel for a race against time to fix stuff, balanced by the risk taken to fix it properly. So the usual score track around the board is replaced by a time track, counting down in minutes from 60. Eg., an event my appear that indicates the oxygen pumps are failing and we’ll be asphyxiated in 10 minutes, so a marker is placed at this point on the time track. If the pumps are not fixed by the time the last player has reached this point, we’re all gone! But, the longer a player spends attempting to fix the problem, the greater their chance of success – they first nominate how many minutes (up to 10) they will spend on a problem before attempting to roll below this number on a d10. As players spend time moving and fixing stuff, new event cards are drawn, thus introducing new perils that have to be fixed.
My peers know that I’m not the greatest fan of co-operative, goal games, but this one appealed to me, for reasons I probably can’t articulate well. Maybe it’s the compact little board, components and packaging, and the implication that it will play quickly (although I think this is deceptive!). Or maybe that the theme is a little lighter than the likes of Battlestar Galactica, Shadows Over Camelot, and Pandemic. Also, unlike the former two, there is no traitor hidden amongst the players. However, it is possible for an individual player to win by escaping from a doomed ship with the help of an aqualung. The risk is that if the remaining players manage to survive to the end, they theoretically hunt down and kill the deserter, who therefore loses individually!
Despite the fact that in our game we all died of asphyxiation before the halfway point, I liked this one enough to actually buy a copy. Obviously I’m keen to bust it out maybe at the next Sunday night session I make it to.
12 mins rules, 60 mins game time (which is probably about half of a game that would play out to a full and successful conclusion with this number of players (7)).
Dead submariners: Mike K, Richard, Lin, Giles, Ed, Brian, Paul.

The Three Commandments: This is a new take on the inductive reasoning style of game (eg; Eleusis, Zendo), with a good dose of silliness thrown in. In fact Alex (who had played earlier with others) described it as a cross between Zendo and Quao. The central board consists merely of a number of radially symmetrical segments, upon which are placed about a dozen or so ‘artefacts’ (simple wooden rods) in 3 different colours. Players take turns to be a spell-caster, in which they draw four (keep three) secret rules cards from two decks. One set describes the scoring rules for moving rods on the board (eg; 3 points for moving a brown artefact), while the other describes the scoring for various actions and gestures that the active player might perform during their artefact move (eg., 4 points if the player touches their nose). The spell-caster fixes upfront whether each card will score positive or negative points.
The other players take a turn each, then a second, to move one of the artefacts on the board. The spell-caster then indicates to all which, if any, of the rules cards have been satisfied and scores them accordingly on a hidden score-sheet. The other players, all watching intently, attempt to guess which moves and actions to perform (or avoid!), in order to score positive.
When we started, Richard explained excitedly that actions could include crazy stuff like singing and dancing, and you could just tell that he was waiting on those cards to come into play. In fact, I think he didn’t wait, and may have tried singing and dancing on every other player’s turn anyway, just because he wanted to…
Eventually, on Ed’s turn as spell-caster, a dance by Alex seemed to score and therefore everyone was performing a routine during their moves. After much hilarity and embarrassment it was revealed that the required gesture was merely to stand up.
Anyway, funny and fun for a party of gamers, and I suspect the more players the better - it went well with our 7.
13 mins rules; 87 mins game time.
Results: Alex: 20. Paul: 19. Ed, Brian: 18 each. Lin: 15. Mike, Richard: 13 each.

Fast Flowing Forest Fellers: We tried this Friedemann demo offering as a night cap, playing the simple 2-board intro scenario. Players control two figures each and attempt to race them down river. This was immediately reminiscent of Mississippi Queen, although movement is controlled through a fixed set of movement cards, a la Ave Caesar, et al. The interesting feature is the bumping of figures and log hazards as you go - a kind of simple physics simulation, although I expect this has probably been explored in other games somewhere. You can get some interesting effects by riding on river current spaces and nudging your opponents onto them too.
I thought this was an OK game. But by the end we were wondering if we’d missed something in the rules, since there didn’t seem to be all that much to it - if you’ll forgive the river puns, it was rather dry and shallow…
However, it could be given another chance, if played with more interesting river segments.
15 mins rules and setup; 30 mins game time.
Results: Mike (green): win. Brian (black): 2nd. Paul (blue): 3rd. Ed (red): 4th.

Moto Grand Prix: This was the first game I played on the Sunday night, although I can only claim 2/3rds – I came in late and took over from Kylie, who preferred not to have to deal with the additional complexity of the lap 2 rules. Anyway, motor cycle racing, if you like that sort of thing. Race games rarely get me all that excited, and on the whole this was not a stand-out exception. But there is some careful tactical planning required in responding to the cornering changes, and risk-taking with braking and using up extra engine power. Importantly, you get little motorcycle racing figures, that are supposed to bank into corners and even do wheelies, which have an impact on the behaviour of your racer and the others. A minor quibble is that in this brand new set belonging to Giles, the little plastic mountings were a bit loose in most of the figures, which meant that your posing of them wouldn’t necessarily hold. I suggested that he add a little bit of chewing gum to the base to help stabilise them…
Paul M. (taking over from Kylie): 1st. Brian: 2nd. Giles: 3rd. Neil F: 4th. Paul X (ie., ‘the other Paul’): 5th.

Mission Red Planet: Phyll C and Jeff from the Glebe group (who cross over with Neil F) invited Brian and I to join them in something, and quickly proposed this retro, Vernian-looking game about colonising regions on Mars (apparently inspired by, or related to to something called ’steampunk’, about which I know nothing). Points are gained at fixed turns of the game, based primarily on area majorities in the various states on Mars (just like El Grande). There are bonus points to be had by collecting the most singleton scoring tokens, and a few various mission bonuses that arise including one dealt out at the start). In a turn, you populate and launch spaceships from Earth, the rules being determined by the play of character cards from your hand (a bit like Citadels, although all players use an identical deck). The individual characters include plays like, ‘add two crew cubes and sabotage another ship’, or ‘add 1 cube and swap an opponent’s cube for one of yours’, etc.
Neat, and easy to play. If y’all care to indulge me a yet another quibble about component quality… I’m not a fan of the gloss-finish box, and the type of game board folds resulted in the board not sitting flat on the table (see Brian’s pic). The artwork was nice, but I thought they could have used more of it – that retro-Vernian (steampunk) thing only really came across in the character cards, and was hinted at with the rockets, but otherwise that was it. Nitpicking mode now off.
13 mins rules and setup; 57 mins game time.
Results: Paul (blue): 49 (+8). Brian (yellow) 39. Phyll C. (green): 19. Jeff (purple): 15.
NB: The (+8) here could be argued with, because I misunderstood and completed the requirements of my mission card (occupy 5 regions) in a photo-negative configuration of what was intended. Phyll and Jeff kindly conceded that I was entitled to the points, but since I had the highest score without them anyway, I can simply take the moral high-ground and not accept the bonus!

Felix the Cat in the Sack: At a nearly-ridiculous time of the night I agreed to participate in one last game if it was a short one, filler-style. It was OK with me since I only had to go upstairs to retire to bed anyway. So out came Felix. Brian and I needed a rules refresher since it was a long time between playings of this, but we managed to score overwhelmingly against our hosts anyway. In fact, this was the 3rd game in a row tonight in which I won and Brian came in second against at least two other opponents. Just thought I’d mention that.
5 mins rules; 19 mins game time.
Paul: 66. Brian: 59. Phyll: 31. Jeff: 30.

On the final day I arrived at the exhibition hall to see Alex just starting in a new game of Heads of State, one of the most recent items released in English by Z-Man (originally in German by Eggert-Spiele). The attraction here was the attendance and explanation by the game designer himself, Peter Hawes. I can’t make any significant comment on the gameplay except that it looked quite good and I look forward to having a go. It was great having a chat to Peter about his experience with the game design (the root of the idea in 3 days of isolation at Alan Moon’s house!) and the publishing offers.

Batavia: The last game of the weekend for me, played at midday on Monday. This was one of Ed’s new acquisitions (an Xmas present, maybe?), and looked quite nice. It was tempting me on the games vendors’ shelves, so I was keen to give it a try before committing to a purchase. The theme is European trading companies in the nineteenth century, working in the East Indies I guess. Players bid on, collect and play shares in up to five trading companies, in order to acquire scoring tokens and various commodity majorities. A disruptive ‘pirate’ arises every so often, to wipe out the majority played company, allowing the next player to potentially start it up again with a minimal ‘investment’. Share bidding and purchases, trading commodities and warehousing are all rather abstracted concepts in Batavia, although the game is easy to play and creates a true sense of competition and tension, especially as the game nears its endpoint. It is also looks nice, although the game play puts it fairly and squarely into the semi-abstract Euro category. I’d enjoy playing this again, but it’s not as meaty and ‘economic-y’ as I would have liked, so I decided to buy something else instead. (Knizia’s Lost Cities board game, to be precise)…
26 mins (interrupted) rules and setup; 58 mins game time.
Results: Richard (purple): 37. Ed (orange): 33. Brian (red): 30. Alex (yellow): 25. Paul (blue): 24.

Venue: Brian’s place
Present: Neil F., Andrew, Richard, Alex, Brian
Played: Chicago Express, Agricola, Big Shot, Skat
Reporter: Brian, no photos

We started the evening with Chicago Express. This was my second go at this. 4 companies, and 5 players introduced a few interesting aspects to this game. Neil didn’t pick up a share in the starting round of auctions, but managed to get a cheap one in the second round, and the Wabash line in the end. One memorable aspect of the game was to constantly make improvements to your railroads that would help other players, sometimes seemingly more for them. It is also a bit tricky figuring out who is actually winning, although Al did seem to be collecting a lot of cash on his wide range of investments.
About 90 minutes
Results: Alex: 96, Brian: 74, Richard: 63, Neil: 59, Andrew: 57

We had a bit of meta-gaming, involving sliding boxes of games up and down a table, resulting in the selection of Agricola. This was only Andrew’s second go at this, and it had been a while for him between plays, although the rest of us had a fair bit of experience. We cracked open the interactive deck, which was a first for me. I had the butter churn, which allowed me get some food just for having certain multiples of animals, and a card that let me play 2 actions in one go, which I only got to use once, just when I became start player, netting me a whole bunch of animals. I didn’t have an oven, so I couldn’t cook, but I did use my slaughterhouse, which gave me food whenever another player cooked. No begging cards were taken, but it was close for most of us. Al chose the holiday house minor improvement on turn 16 (lots of VP’s), so he didn’t have a turn 17, but he did express some rather curious affection for one of the sheep.
About 90 minutes
Results: Richard: 34, Brian: 32, Neil: 31, Alex: 28, Andrew: 22

Andrew departed for the east, and we opened up Neil’s newly acquired (maths trade) copy of Big Shot. Here each turn there is an auction to have the right to distribute little influence blocks around the map/board. If you run out of money, you borrow (at increasingly expensive rates) from the bank. The game reminded me a bit of Clans (although it plays completely differently), dropping little blocks around to get control of areas. It is an excellent example of an abstract game where one really understands how to play after the game is over. I got carried away with the auctions, ignoring the fact that Richard was bidding things up, but not really spending anything. This is a particularly enjoyable game, if one takes the bidding light-heartedly, and one pays attention to the nuances of influence placement.
About 30 minutes with rules
Results: Richard: 23 (ish), Alex: -17, Neil: -18, Brian: -29

After Neil departed for the north, we took up a training session of the German card game Skat. Richard explained the game, which Al had some experience of, and I feigned comprehension while desperately attempting to not look like Homer Simpson. The game isn’t too complicated, but it appeared so at first. I look forward to some more of this (now that I have a better understanding).
About 45 minutes
Results: Alex: 48, Richard: 44, Brian: 0 (well could have been worse)

Thanks to Al for recording the scores.

Venue: Paul’s place
Present: Alex, Jeff, Pat, Paul.
Played: Straw, Fairy TaleBattlestar Galactica, Tichu.

A belated report of a small gaming session with just the Sunday night hard core.

Straw: New, light evening starter provided by Alex. Players play from a hand of four cards, onto the camel’s back. Make sure you’re not the one forced to push the total nett load over 50 (there are some negative cards), or you’ll score 0 for the round while everyone else gets the value of their held cards. The best outcome is to to play the one (and only) Straw card onto the back of the fully-loaded camel, to score alone and give your opponents 0 each instead. Kind of simple, maybe a notch above dumb, but fun anyway.
18 mins incl. rules.
Results: Jeff: 64. Paul: 48. Pat: 39. Alex: 12.

Fairy Tale: Seems to be part of the staple diet (but not for me).
9 mins for 3 players – could that be a record?
Results: Pat: 60. Jeff: 38. Alex: 30.

Battlestar Galactica: Time for the real game of the evening – BG still retains its new shininess. Initial card drawings:
Pat: Gaius Baltar.
Jeff: Tom Zarek.
Paul: “Chief” Galen Tyrol.
Alex: Kara “Starbuck” Thrace.
I drew the Cylon on the first deal of loyalty cards. After getting it late in the previous game of this, I would have been quite happy not to draw it this game, but I felt ready to give it a go anyway.
Thanks to Pat being suspicious of Jeff from the play of his first move, I felt comfortable enough to stay ‘hidden’ and to antagonise the paranoia for as long as practicable. Jeff stayed in the brig for a significant amount of time, during which I tried to hint to both him and Alex that Pat was the likely Cylon because of readiness to accuse Jeff and the fact that on the balance of probabilities (he had two loyalty cards) it was more likely to be Pat. Alex seemed to be unconvinced either way of guilt or innocence and played a very straight bat – no second-guessing in any of his actions.
With both the distance progress and the indicators ticking agonisingly slowly, I felt there was no value in revealing my Cylon-ness, and so played a strategy of talking down visible Cylon threats (which Alex was dealing with easily given his re-rolls) and minimal/no help rather than active hindrance that would have more likely increased suspicions. I thought I might have popped up and become more overtly evil well before the end of the first phase if the pop and other indicators had driven down a bit more quickly.
As my ‘accusations’ of Pat became more aggressive and my participation in Cylon engagements became more obviously unhelpful, Pat picked me on about turn 2 into the 2nd half and got to peek at my loyalty with one of his special cards before he brigged me. Now was the time to play the Cylon line hard, and I doubt that I could have squeezed the Galactica crew any harder than I did with my available cards and turn options. By the end, the result was a lot closer to the bone than I expected it would be – I actually thought the Galactica humans would storm it in. But they limped home after some trying Cylon encounters, with remaining Fuel of 1, Food 4, Morale 1 and Population of 2.
7 mins rules and setup; 168 mins game time.

Tichu: The closer. Had planned on a 1000-point game, but we agreed to settle on a 500 limit because our scores inched up so slowly. We finally ticked over after midnight and nine hands. Another close one, but the unlikely pairing of Jeff and me was triumphant!
84 mins.
Results: Paul+Jeff: 500. Alex+Pat: 495.

Jan 9, 2009: An atypical game session with some visitors
Venue: Paul’s place
Present: Fraser, Nick, Paula, Paul.
Played: Agricola.

Holiday time often brings ‘atypical’ gaming sessions, although these are generally with family or extended family members. In this case the session was organised with a couple of local lads – Fraser and Nick (obviously not the Fraser from Melbourne, and not the other, semi-regular, Nick, who is also a local). Fraser’s 6-year-old is in the same class at school as our 6-year-old, while Nick is a long-time gaming friend of Fraser’s.
The original discussion was around a session for Power Grid, Fraser’s new Xmas present. But after looking through my collection (on BGG) the decision settled on Agricola as a high-profile game not ever played by either of our visitors.
After a long rules and setup session, punctuated by old-school gaming discussion (especially from the Play-By-Mail days) we all settled in the groove of the game quite quickly. For me the available Minor Improvement cards were ordinary at best, but my Occupation cards seemed good, providing an emphasis on clay production and ‘trading’. Fraser too had some cards that seemed to favour clay acquisition, although I didn’t feel significantly pressured competition in this during the game. The real crunch came in getting the Pottery Major Improvement card, which I managed to score apparently a mere 1 turn action or so ahead of Fraser.
Nick had some good Improvement cards to play, which he did frequently, although perhaps wasn’t able to optimise the timing on these – something hard to get right on your first taste of the game. Paula eschewed the playing of cards for most of the game, except until the last few turns or so.
But competition certainly did kick in, with Nick trumping several crucial actions for me throughout the game by playing them immediately before I was able to. The most memorable of these was his snatch of the Travelling Players space on one turn, which netted him only 2 or 3 food tokens but would have provided me with 4 (I had the Dancer occupation). As a result I was forced to eat one of my two pigs at harvest time, and was never able to acquire more or breed for the rest of the game.
By focussing on use of my cards and attempts to be frugal otherwise, I played a different type of strategy this game compared to my usual pattern of play, which is to try and plough and sow fields as early as possible to get the grain engine running. This game I ploughed only a single field and never sowed, instead relying mainly on my Dancer for food (and that one pig – grumble grumble -).
Fraser seemed to corner the sheep market, while Nick cleaned up the timber, and Paula, to everyone’s building detriment, seemed to prevent anyone else from ever collecting reeds (not quite, but the dearth of reeds due to her grabbing was one of the most memorable features of the game).
Paula ended up with the best score, helped along by an Improvement card (I forget which!) that allowed no negatives (except empty spaces) to be scored at the end.
Having just got the hang of Agricola, Fraser and Nick were now ready to move beyond their first learning game to play properly! Alas, being after midnight, rainchecks were written and the game box stowed for another day…
60 mins rules and setup, 128 mins game time.
Results: Paula (green): 33. Paul (purple): 28. Fraser (white): 26. Nick (blue): 15.

Venue: Paul’s place
Present: Alex, Jeff, Neil F., Pat, Paula, Paul.
Played: Race for the Galaxy, Battlestar Galactica, Silk Road, Auf der Pirsch.

A much reduced complement tonight as everyone else moves into or emerges from the holiday season.

Race for the Galaxy: The starter in space.
33 mins game time.
Results: Pat (blue): 48. Alex (red): 43. Jeff (green): 38.

Battlestar Galactica: Fresh from Thursday night for Pat and me, we launched this onto Neil, Alex and Jeff for their first playing. There was much paranoia early in the first ‘phase’, although by the end of this part I think all of us had concluded that probably no-one had drawn a Cylon card.
Pat took the Admiral Adama character and was able to consistently draw jump values of 3 each with each jump. Alex was Starbuck, and proved to be quite successful at holding back the Cylon Raider hordes. I was the President this time, and I was able to be effective with green card contributions to skill checks and the use of quorum cards to stave off the boarders (a rule that we played wrong last time). Although we lost a few civilian ships, we spent more effort in this game protecting our population. As a result, the humans were looking very healthy at the ‘half-way’ point, so healthy in fact that any Cylons were not going to get it easy once drawn. Their best chance would be to try to run down the fuel, which was sitting at 2 points remaining.
Well, I drew a Cylon card at the 2nd draw point, and I suspected that either Jeff (as Boomer) or Neil (Chief Galen Tyrol) had the other; most likely Jeff just through the weight of statistics (he had three cards to everyone elses two).
In hindsight I should have activated my Cylon-ness immediately on my next turn in order to be as successful as possible. I ended up doing this instead on the second or third turn around, after not taking account of the fact that when you reveal, you effectively lose a whole turn of actions to be transported to the Cylon Resurrection ship. But I thought it would be worthwhile to the Cylon cause to play out at least one Crisis card that put some combat pressure onto the team. The two Crisis cards I drew as President were rather soft and the (harder) one I did choose ineffectually wound down Morale by another point or so.
I read somewhere (game tips in the rulebook, maybe), that as a loyal human in the first half of the game, you want to play well for the Galactica, but not too well, lest you become a Cylon in the second half. While I tried to observe this, I probably did contribute far too many positive cards to the Skill checks. But the real killer, and most significant difference between this game and Thursday’s, was the rate that the jump card values were revealed - as stated, Pat (as the loyal Admiral) pulled out three 3s in a row, which basically put too much ‘distance’ between Galactica and the Cylons for the latter to have a late chance.
38 mins rules and setup; 115 mins game time.
Results: Loyal humans Pat, Alex and Neil F. successfully reach Earth before the Cylon infiltrators Paul and Jeff could pull them back.

Silk Road: Something light for 5p was chosen, with Neil heading off (we didn’t get to play his Cavum) and Paula joining in.
Another game of paranoia, with people suspecting me of being in the lead following a few cash pickups I was able to make.
We played the straight rules, but I’m now convinced that the next play of this needs to use Marshall P’s variant (described here under Greg Schloesser’s review) of paying to take an action token, rather than the arbitrary assigning of turn order.
18 mins rules and setup; 47 mins game time.
Results: Alex and Jeff: 39 each. Pat: 38. Paula and Paul: 30 each.

Auf der Pirsch: Another game to get a second work-out in this group since Thursday, with Pat and Paula the veterans.
6 mins rules; about 30 mins game time.
Results (player: 4 individual hand scores,total): Alex: 39,33,36,32,140. Pat: 30,8,24,56,118. Jeff: 18,30,33,20,101. Paula: 14,44,10,13,81.