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A quiet evening at The Red Herring on Gresham Street this evening – barely into double figures for attendees, the light seemed especially poor and the crispy pork belly with lentils and black pudding a little too chewy for my liking.
Tonight saw the first appearance at London On Board for fellow designer Ian Vincent (Fruit Bandits plus many almost-but-not-quite-s, Runner up at the 2010 Ticket to Ride World Championships, World 'Versus' Champion and serial narrator of his own life and game thoughts); he came with a play-test map and tickets for his forthcoming entry in the Days Of Wonder Ticket to Ride Map competition – I won’t (obviously) reveal the exact nature of the map, but we ended up completing three and four player games to the great satisfaction of all participants. My shameful third place was followed by a dazzling 2nd place by a single point – it’s all my own fault for building a 15 point link one link away from my longest network thus giving away the 10pt ‘longest’ line prize.
Ian sent me all the layout files earlier, so even if it goes no further in the contest, I’ll have a copy of it to play at home!
An utterly disastrous Wits & Wagers served as a rather sour filling to the train-themed bread of the rest of the evening – let’s just say that I ended the game with what I started and failed to get above 3 money at ANY point *sad face*
To round off the evening, I suggested a ‘quick’ 4-player Paperclip Railways which, with rules explanations and coaching, came in at a little over 90 minutes…ninety bloody minutes...for a game that has consistently been coming in at around 60! While the players seemed to ‘get it’, I’m not sure that the overly-long playing time did anything to endear the game to them. It’s also quite depressing to be still playing a game when everyone else had packed up and gone home!
We were the last ones to leave the venue (around 10.15) and I still had the journey across London, the train to Beaconsfield and then a short drive ahead of me – not getting to the comfort of bed before midnight!
Today hasn’t been bad, all-in-all; another positive was an idea to include placeholder cards in the basic Paperclip Railways deck for when players get hold of various promotional stations (there are already at least FOUR ready to go). The idea is the placeholders are the same card stock as the base set but I can print & make up promos using any card-stock without them affecting the draw deck: play out a placeholder and swap it for one of the promos from the game box!
I’m full of ideas, me and *burp* also, it seems, full of badly-underdone pork belly too.
How one suffers for one's art!
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