Yesterday was board games night at a friend’s place. But because it was Good Friday and school holidays, several of the other guys had family things on, or were travelling, so there were only three of us present.
We began with a game of Great Western Trail: Argentina. This is a long game which the owner has been playing solo and wanting us to try multi-player for a while. It’s fairly complex and took some serious rules explanation, but easy enough to pick up once we got going, as every turn is short and while there are strategic decisions to be made the choices aren’t overwhelming.
You can essentially mix and match four different strategies:
- Hiring cowboys (or gauchos, I suppose) and acquiring better cattle (worth more money during the game and points at the end of the game).
- Hiring builders and building buildings, which give you extra abilities, plus tolls when other players move past them.
- Hiring train drivers and developing your train track to provide a shorter route to get your cattle to market, as well as other benefits.
- Hiring farmers and using them to grow grain, which allows you to ship your cattle to more prestigious ports, earning higher points.
I went heavy on the cowboys and cattle, with a little bit of farming. One other player went heavily into the train, while the other concentrated on building. It was fairly close in the end, but I managed to win with my prestigious collected herd of cows!
Then we played some quick games of Jump Drive, and an abstract strategy game that one of the guys had picked up from a gaming club that he attends.
Today I did a 2.5k run in the morning, and then picked up the grocery order at lunch time. I couldn’t get the groceries yesterday because of the Good Friday holiday (with the supermarket being closed). Today it was super busy there – I haven’t seen that many people in the supermarket for a long time. Of course everyone was doing their shopping today, given yesterday and tomorrow the supermarkets are all closed for the Easter public holidays.
The other notable thing was the weather – yesterday it was very rainy, with heavy falls at times. And today it was pleasantly sunny, but cool, and in the afternoon it became very windy. The wind is so strong they’ve closed Sydney Airport’s runways and don’t expect them to open again for several hours. The forecast for tomorrow is also very windy.
New content yesterday:
New content today: