Oregon or The Way the West was Lost

I was asked by Paultro if I could arrive earlier than usual for a Saturday games session, in order to give him a steer on one of his new games: Martin Wallace's two-player "A Few Acres of Snow". His is not the limited edition version that I play with Crabro but he has "pimped" it very nicely with wooden pieces from elsewhere and tiny period cannon as the siege markers.

Inevitably, not only had Paultro made the right assumptions about the rules he was unclear about but knew how to use them to good effect, so my mentoring was largely redundant and, yes, I lost my fourth straight game as the British. I can see I will never play the French but according to all I have read, if the game is "broken" it is in favour of the British which is fueling my growing conviction that it is not the game for me.

This time I tried a more aggressive military strategy but failed to make any impact in sieges, always playing catch-up to the French who start ahead in military terms. Paultro's French expanded all over the place, reducing my spending ability with regular piracy and even sieging and capturing two of my early gains.

He ran the game out by using up all his villages. This was delayed slightly by another failed siege on my part but invevitably I lost by a substantial margin. It's a fascinating game to play, and I very much enjoyed playing it with Paultro, but I think I have had enough of it now or at least next time I lose I would prefer it to be for the blues for a change.

...It was 1846 and the farmers were moving into the rich lands of Oregon...at least it was sometime after six o'clock anyway. There has been a large influx of new games into the groups in recent weeks with some games appearing at attractive prices in remaindered book store chain The Works which are quite well rated on "The 'geek". Next week should see the arrival of yet more as half of the Thursday group return from their visit to the biggest game event on the planet: Essen "Spiel". Saturday saw us play one of the recent acquisitions from The Works though: "Oregon"

Paultro's partner fed us to bursting with her usual culinary skill and together with Paultro's brother "Simtro" we turned to Oregon. This turned out to be a very simple game as far as the rules were concerned but the decisions became much more complex as the game wore on and the board filled up with buildings and "farmeeples".

A turn sees you simply playing two cards (either both landscape or landscape and building), placing a farmer or a building and scoring. The only problem we had in the early stages were with the two sets of scoring rules for farmers or buildings and initially we were flipping backwards and forwards through the rules. This could be avoided with a little player aid but it quickly becomes second nature anyway and as the scores are printed on the buildings, as well as the special powers of two of them, rule referral was fairly quickly a thing of the past. Each player also has two reversible tiles which give her either an immediate second turn or act as a wildcard replacing a landscape card. The power of two of the buildings is to refresh these tiles which are turned over to the exhausted side when used.

I did pretty well in the early stages as I grasped the basic rules pretty quickly. In the end I lost, partly because I failed to get my farmers next to many gold mines and it didn't hit home to me until the end how much different this would be from the coal mines. Proximity to the mines gives the farmer a chip with a hidden number on the reverse which is only revealed in end scoring. The coal ranges from 1 to 3 points but the gold from 3 to 5. Yes, it is obvious when you think about it but I didn't.

After Oregon, which had actually ended fairly closely with Paultro in the lead, we wound down with a very light filler I had played recently: Viva il Re (aka "King Me!".

For some reason, what to me is the ultimate in simple games, took a while to sink in with my opponents, perhaps understandably tired on a work day or perhaps just still thinking of colonising Oregon. By the second round everyone was up to speed though and ruthlessly offering royalty for the chop. By luck or judgement I was doing rather nicely but in the final round Paultro overtook me by a couple of points to achieve his hat-trick for the day.

We wound down with chat over delicious home-made cakes and tea but after the chef had retired for the night and "the lads" settled in front of the footer the talk was still mostly of games, game designers and "Cons"