Heli-op-zijn-kopter.
Walibi in general often uses a post-apocalyptic theme. I didn't expect that.
@Joop
En het is niet de eerste keer dat een Trump supporter bij een grote bijeenkomst "per ongeluk" de Hitlergroet geeft:
We played 18Ardennes for the first time yesterday. Although my dad claims we've played it once before, but I have no recollection of that.
The main downside is that maybe there's a bit too much going on, and everything has its own custom rules. You can get bonus income from mines, from ferries, from collecting fort tokens and from east-west and north-south runs, and everything works slightly differently, so it's easy to mix up and forget something.
I'm not sure why Hecht loves using so many minors; 1861 works great with far less minors. 1861 is by a different desiger (Ian Wilson), but feels similar to 18EU and 18Ardennes in scope, starting with minors and later turning them into majors.
I like that 18Ardennes keeps minors viable until the end; you don't have to merge them into majors. And they first turn into 5-share companies before you can convert to 10-shares, which makes the switch from minor to major more attractive, and that conversion is really just about issuing more shares to attract more money, which feels realistic and appropriate, giving the game a smooth progression. Downside is that it took a while before we started buying each other's shares. I think the game could have used more stock rounds; one after each operating round, instead of two.
Oh yeah, my son won. This is starting to become a regular occurrence. Once upon a time I used to be the most common winner of these games in our family, but those days increasingly seem to be behind us.
Been playing around with my new 3d printer, making tile holders for 18xx games. It's always annoying having to sort those and keep them from getting all over the place, and it turns out there's a neat .scad project that lets you specify exactly how big you want these to be. My A1 mini isn't very big, so mine are pretty small.
#3Dprinting #18xx #bambu
An old friend of mine started doing 45-day challenges: if he wants to change some habit, he has to keep it up for 45 days, and after that, ue can decide to continue doing it or he can stop. He's done a lot of them, and acquired a lot of positive new habits that way, but one of them is that every day he writes 5 sentences. Sometimes a poem, sometimes the start of a short story, or something else.
Anyway, this got me thinking: as a kid, I used to draw a lot. Somewhere along the way I quit. I want to pick it up again, so for the next 45 days, I will draw something every day. It doesn't have to be good or finished, but it has to be something.
And here's my first one: a dragon perched on Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin.
We played I think our third game of 1861 this year. It's still my favourite 18xx game, although it's possible the fact that I won again is a factor in that.
A setback was that I couldn't save Nikolaev from nationalisation, so immediately after losing it, I created Ekaterinin which turned into an amazingly good company that dominated the end game. My brother thought I created it just to use it to buy a train and then dump it (a valid strategy), but I just really wanted another company.
My real leap ahead happened when I could convert Ekaterinin from minor to major just before a new stock round, but decided not to. Instead, I kept it as a minor for one more operating round, used my money to buy the other players' shares instead, and used the revenue from that to convert Ekaterinin one round later. That put me ahead in shares at a critical moment when several companies were running 3 train routes and making ridiculous revenues, which helped me buy more shares than anyone else, and that's ultimately what wins the game.
#18xx #1861 #boardgames
