Carolina in the morning

...is a tough, unforgiving place to be if you didn't sleep very well and are playing the Southern Carolina expansion of Steam against a very aggressive opponent, intent on stopping you building track into any of the most lucrative areas.

Crabro won both games by a good ten points or so with me being unable to make runs or worthwhile track builds in the last couple of turns.


Nevertheless, I could see that it was a well thought out game and satisfying to play. Despite being a little irritated by one rule, which required us to pay a dollar for each run requiring us to to arrange our builds so as to be left cash in hand all the time, we both rated it highly . ...which is more than I can say of our last Steam game of the day.

After lunch, we played another expansion which was based on an Age of Steam map of Jamaica and rules for a two-player variant. This small island was very tight with difficulty getting long runs, particularly for me. We had pretty much sewn up one of the extreme ends of the island each. In the end this was a narrow victory for me but neither of us rated the variant very highly or could imagine wanting to repeat the experience. At times we were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy (it is very costly to build on all the hilly and mountainous terrain) which is not something we've had to worry about in any of our previous games of Steam.

We were both ready for something familiar and not too demanding after that and settled on finishing the day with a few games of "Ingenious" or, as my version is called "Mensa connections". I think we played three in the end, although "best of five" was suggested at one point. At any rate the deciding match ended in a draw which seemed to be a good place to finish.

For such a cheap game (I think it was in the region of six or seven pounds) this is a very nice experience. Designed by the famous Reiner Knizia and with satisfyingly solid components, this is a tile laying abstract game which is highly recommended. It plays well and fast, can be played solo, is simple to learn and teach and seems to me to appeal to a wide cross-section of gamers.

There is an online version on Matthew Marquand's "Memoirs of a Board Gamer" site which is recommended if you want to try out how the game plays or have a quick solo game. For the full experience you need to buy those nice plastic and cardboard bits though [Note Matthew says there is a bug in a recent Firefox release which is causing problems with Ingenious - so play  it in Chrome... :-) ] There are other games on Matthew's site too: Coloretto is also recommended for a quick, enjoyable solo play.