This week we were all lined up for a four player game of Opera when Mark G arrived to give us five players. Once Opera waspacked away again, we opted for 20th Century, the new game from Shipyard designer, Vladimir Suchy. This was an interesting game of trying to balance coin and science production (the two currencies for the two types of auction in the game) with garbage disposal and victory point production. Not knowing the land tile distribution (or more specifically the recycling plant distribution) for our first game, most of us started off pretty conservatively, except for Mark K who bought four land tiles on the first turn with the asociated 10 garbage tokens. For a while, it wasn’t looking too promising for him but he did eventually manage to acquire the necessary recycling plants to get rid of his waste, although we were very kind to him in allowing him to acquire the right tiles without overpaying – I think we were all too concerned with our own garbage and pollution. Nige and I were pretty starved of science points so we were resigned to taking the worst catastrophes while Mark G steadily built up an impressive ‘green’ economy and scored loads in the final bonuses. However, Mark K ended up in a different league as he cleared all his garbage and also scored lots of points at the end to add to an already sizeable lead built up during the rest of the game.
We all enjoyed this and will probably have a better idea of how adventurous to be, now knowing that recycling becomes more common as the game progresses. Good stuff and a good win for Mark K.
Scores and ratings are up on my Trickylight site.