Yesterday’s game session was a bit of a disappointment. I wanted to play Colorado Midland, as I’d just picked up the Winsome Essen set. Unfortunately, waiting for a while didn’t produce an extra player, so we couldn’t get a game going and had to play Sahara to spend some time in the lack of better games (and to score a new rated game for Geek).

I did manage a game of Acquire, first time in eight years (mandatory archive link 1, mandatory archive link 2). I’ve been wanting to revisit the game, thanks to Iain and other who’ve been mentioning it. I like it better now. I used to rate it 6, it’s a 7 now. It’s still a bit long (our game took 75 minutes) for what it is, and the luck of the tiles can screw you, but still, not a bad game.

Here’s what I wrote on G+ about our game:

Even better was winning the game. Even better was how I won the game. Tower was the biggest hotel chain in our game, reaching the 41 squares required to end the game. I was building it, because I thought my seven shares would be good enough for second place and that’s the best I had.

Well, the Tower bonuses were resolved as the last step of scoring. I was doing well, but not certain of winning. I show my seven shares, and everybody else shows six. The perfect 7-6-6-6 split! $22,400 for me, $9,200 for everybody else. I win $46,300 to $43,800.

Acquire is a decent game, but perhaps a tad long for the amount of luck involved. In our game, the loser was about $15,000 behind everybody else, mostly because she ran out of money after missing the first merger. I’m guessing that’s not that rare. If Acquire was reliably a 45-minute game, I could consider buying it for my collection, but I’m guessing it’s more like a 60-70-minute game. As it is, I’m glad to play it if an opportunity presents itself. It’s still probably the best game published in the 1960’s.

The game I played and the game I wanted to play:

Acquire, early in the game. The Tower was the biggest chain in our game: