Can't stop (playing Steam)

Tuesday games were more satisfying because Crabro and I continued to explore expansions of one of our favourite games: Steam. It's nice when we hit on a game to which we want to give more time and a number of plays.

This has happened a number of times and although we have very different tastes in many things, it is a joy to find that our enthusiasms for certain games coincides. So far this was most seen in our passion for Richard Borg's games and in particular Commands and Colors: Ancients which inspired Crabro to give me the pictured T-shirt and thus the name of this blog.

This week we played three more Steam variants, after which I'm afraid I betrayed my lightweight status and asked if we could finish the day with something less taxing on my little brain.

The variants were: Andalucia, Umbria and Sardinia and the result was inevitably to demonstrate that Crabro is the better network planner. This was no surprise to me as he has always shown a very good eye for routes in our various train games.

Personally, I still thoroughly enjoy these games, and I'm glad I persevered after feeling so out of my depth in my very first 18xx game. Sometimes, these days, I surprise myself by actually being quite competitive though, and it is these games that I think we both enjoy most. In this case I actually won the first game (Andalucia?) albeit by a tiny margin. The second game (Sardinia?) was a run away win by Crabro but I do appreciate the compliment he pays me in making no concessions to my level of play and using "hardball" blocking tactics.

The third game was another win for Crabro but pretty close and a satisfying contest. Having been successfully starved of goods to run, I had no second run available in the last round but it could at least be said that the winning margin was in the range of a single run. I think we both had a grand time with our trains again anyway and would score all three of these variants highly.

Crabro kindly acceded to my plea for something simpler to finish on and we settled on a classic, simple Sid Sackson game: Can't Stop. Sometimes called "Roll or Don't" this is a pared down "push your luck" dice game. Both the games we played had similar endings: With Crabro poised to win, I had nothing to lose in pushing my luck and in both cases, contrary to my characteristic whinging, my luck held.