Harrowed Halls

This week we played Settlers of America: Trails to Rails, one of the latest releases in the Settlers series of seemingly never ending games. As the name implies, this game takes place in America and has the familiar hex layout on the board. Players use settlers to build towns that then produce goods. To win the game, each player must ship all of his goods to towns belonging to other players using his trains and rails. The game dynamics are very similar to the original Settlers. You use resource cards to buy settlers, rails, trains, and development cards. And these resource cards are generated by a dice roll and the proximity of your towns. Another use for resource cards is to move you settlers to new areas and to move your trains along the rails. This game also adds the dynamic of gold to the mix. Gold can be used to buy resource cards and to allow you to pay to use the tracks of the other players. You can also use it when trading.

I, personally, like this version of Settlers much better than the original. I suck at the original. Even if I should win, I don’t. The resource gods hate me. That’s one of things I really like about Settlers of America. You are getting lots of resource cards–mostly because you need lots of them to do all the things you need to do in the game. So instead of languishing a few turns waiting for the right cards to come along, you get to buy something on almost every turn. This makes the game much more enjoyable for me. They also incorporated the extraordinary build phase, from the 5-6 player game of the original Settlers, in to the normal play. With this, you feel like you are building something all of the time!

In our game, I started off strong–like I usually do. Then floundered at the end of the game–like I usually do. Both Mike and Owen had slow starts but were coming on strong there at the end. In the later rounds Ben overtook me to become the leader. I think this was mostly due to his investment in a second train and to me stupidly trading with him when I shouldn’t have. To which Owen and Mike, but mostly Owen, (rightfully) gave me a bunch of static about. I did have my moment though; see the “Play of the Game” at the end of this write-up. The ended with Ben winning. Mike had jumped into second place with Owen and I tied for third.

Play of the game: Steve using six coal cards to move his train along 18 tracks to deliver a good to a city that Ben was going to use to win the game. Note: This didn’t stop Ben from winning, but the look on his face was priceless!

(The guys said I should have a “Quote of the Game” too. Well I can’t remember a single thing we said, so here’s a quote from Henry Ford instead. Henry didn’t play in our game, but were he alive, he could take my spot.)

Quote of the Game: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t–you’re right.” — Henry Ford

Chaos Steve