This week has been good for board games. On Tuesday, I met a friend for a two-player game of 18GB: The Railways of Great Britain, and yesterday we played another game of Indonesia.
Two-player 18GB is a fine 18xx experience for two. We played the E-W setup this time, cutting the board north of York. This is a curious setup, as the generally congested area between Manchester and York now only has one company, Midland, while the rest of the companies are more on the south edge of the map. The game feels different. I was in a strong lead, but for some reason, my lead evaporated and in the end, I lost slightly. That was good, as we noticed we had missed the rusting of the 4+2 trains – I was the only one to have them, so had I won, it would’ve been with a strong asterisk.
I want to play more 18GB, and playing the two-player game more would be welcome. Our game took under three hours, which was nice, considering my opponent was playing his first game and isn’t the fastest player in our group (with my son, we’ve played a two-player game in under two hours).
Indonesia was awesome. It was our first play with the third edition. It’s a good improvement over the first edition and looks very nice. I would prefer the player bank sheets had the turn structure instead of the screens because we play with open money and don’t use the screens. I think I’ll do some smaller turn structure cards – those won’t be needed for long, but for now are helpful. I also have ordered replacement tokens for the glass bead cities, I’m not a huge fan of those. Having ships in player colours is a nice improvement.
I did pretty well. My business skills were questioned when I merged rubber plantations in a situation where I couldn’t win the bidding. However, I got most of the money and opened up space for new stuff. I ended up owning the only spice plantations in the game and in the end got a personal shipping line. Thanks to that, I was safely second with 857 rupias. The winner was the only new player, who managed to get a monopoly on Siap Saji and made a ton of money with that and some shipping lines, even though he lost the shipping company. Creating one of those Siap Saji companies was a big hit for the shippers – Halmahera was a home for a large spice plantation, which was completely removed in the Siap Saji merger.
On the final round, Tuukka shipped a lot of stuff and had the option of choosing between me and Ville. He saw that I had more money and gave all shipping to Ville. In the final scores, I was ahead of both and Tuukka lost to Ville by 33 rupias – definitely less than he gave to Ville in shipping on the last round. Had he picked me instead, he’d have been third instead of last. But I suppose you either win or lose, and it doesn’t matter that much how much you lose…
(As a side note, I think for competitive play, Indonesia scoring should be based on the ratio of your score and the winner’s score, with no value given to position. That way your incentives are to a) get as much money as you can and b) ensure the winning player gets as little as possible. This makes it unimportant who you give the shipping money at the end of the game, as long as it’s not the player who’s winning the game. That’s just not an interesting part of the game.)
In any case, Indonesia is one of the most attractive games at the moment, and easily ranks as my favourite Splotter game.
