Fast cars, steaming tanks and mysterious horsemen...

So we managed quite a few games today. First a small three player race in Rush n' Crush followed by Planet Steam and then, after being joined by a fourth player, another race and finally some mysterious investigations in A Touch of Evil!

Since it was our first game we just built a short track, but after a couple of turnes we decided to do two laps. I was red, Micke was blue and Anders was yellow. The red dots are mines.

In the first race we started out rather carefully, kind of getting a feel for things. Towards the end though things were a bit different and Micke who had been leading for almost the entire race couldn't quite manage to make a crucial turn and smacked right into a big concrete block! That's the crush of the game I suppose.
This put me in the lead, however my ride was holding together by duct tape and sheer force of will, so when Anders managed to creep up behind me and then ram me it all fell apart. My car erupted into a grand fireball as Anders (or Totentanz as his driver was called) of Team Zombie crossed the finish line. Drat!

Next we had Planet Steam. It has been quite a bit of hubub about this game since before its release and I can see why. It looks very spectacular and it's a really great game of production economics! My experience with these types of games are fairly limited, but after playing Planet Steam I immediately felt that we had no more need for Puerto Rico. They are different in many ways of course, but to me Planet Steam felt a lot more fun, especially with trading and the market playing a larger part. My favourite bit from Puerto Rico is when you get to sell your goods and can be sneaky about it and force other players out etc. Planet Steam has that in much more detail and I loved it! It also being set in this cool steampunk setting doesn't hurt either. Next time I think we should play Mission: Red Planet first, and then Planet Steam as a kind of sequal. Hehe

This is what it looked like afters initial setup. Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures as the game went on, which is too bad since it looks more and more spectacular as more tanks are added to the mining shafts!

Anyway, although I managed to screw up my water supply towards the end of the game, letting Micke and Anders catch up a bit I still won with 799 points against Anders' 780 and Micke's 686. Yay!

Another game of Rush n' Crush. This time with four racers. I took the lead early but was lulled into a false sense of security allowing Martin (another one!) to juuuust pass me. While Anders and Micke went up in flames behind us we were running neck to neck towards the finish line, but in the end Martin had that little extra edge and won with me a micron behind. Good game! A lot of fun. I think longer races might be the best experience though as you have more time to catch up with the leader and use weapons to full effect (normally they don't do much damage so you have to kind of slowly wear the other racers down).

weeeeeeeeeeeeomm!!!

Then a last (kind of rushed) game of A Touch of Evil. For thematic reasons we chose to play agains the Headless Horseman (the game being basically a giant homage/ripoff of Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow). The four of us ran around investigating and collecting equipment to be able to take on the horseman and some of us were luckier than others. I drew a lot of nice cards (a bunch of extra wounds!) and bought the musket early on. Martin (the other one) was doing fairly well too, but both Anders and Micke were struggling. This is the third time I play this game with Anders and he's  had it rough every single time! I don't think he's playing it badly or anything, but it's a very luck driven game and he never seems to get the right tools for the job.

This is actually from our first game as I forgot to take pictures tonight. But I at least wanted to show what it looked like.

In any case, Martin first attempted a showdown and managed to wound the horseman quite a bit but was driven off before he could finish him. A couple of turns later I had concluded that the horsman was hiding in the abandoned keep and a huge melee errupted as I stormed at him with my axe-pitchfork-musket combo! After some wild stabbing, hacking and shooting I stood victorious on the horseman's mangled body! Fear the axeforkmusket...

All in all, a good game day! However, I wish we would at least get started with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Hopefully next time...