Last Night’s Game – Cretaceous Rails and 3 Chapters
Yesterday A, J, M, and I (as in “I” myself as opposed to an anonymizing initial) got together for an afternoon of gaming. It proved to be complicated for an unexpected reason: there was a firefighters’ parade in the streets near A&M’s home. It took me about an hour to find a route to get to their place, and even then A had to leave his apartment and ask a police officer to open a barricade for me.
The first game we played was Cretaceous Rails. The main play area at the start of the game. Each player is a time-travel tour company. You earn points by clearing areas of the jungle, leading tourists to see their favorite dinosaurs, and capturing dinos to take to zoos in the future.
Just don’t step on any butterflies.The game’s action economy is determined by each player putting a pawn (representing a company executive) on the border between two action tiles. They get to do both the actions on either side of the pawn. For example, M (playing white) placed her first pawn for the round to get two actions: sightseeing (get points for a tourist seeing a dino) and construction (add a new building to their resort). The numbers indicate the order in which a pawn was placed, but have no other signficance.The main play area at the end of our game. You can see how we built our train lines through the jungle, clearing tiles of trees and dinos as we went along. Because of the geometry of the tiles, A & M (blue and white respectively) tended to compete for the same tiles, ad did J (red) and I (yellow) on the other side of the jungle.These cards represent buildings you can add to your resort. The graphic at the top of the card indicates how much it costs to buy the building. The icons in the middle of the card show the benefits the building gives you. The pink icons at the bottom of the card show how the card contributes to end-game scoring.My play area at the end of the game. You can see I put a big emphasis on tourism to see the red dinosaurs (T-Rex). The train above the board is used to transport minis (trees, dinos, tourists) back to the resort. The train is currently empty; no tourists were eaten during the course of my tours.The play area of the winner, M. Although she didn’t get an individual dinosaur’s rating as high as I did, she collected more dinos and built more resort buildings to get the highest score.
Although I came in last, I enjoyed the game; it had a nice combination of different mechanics. Plus you could always dream of feeding the executives to the dinosaurs.After the previous long game, we played a smaller game three times: 3 Chapters.As the game’s name implies, 3 Chapters is played in three phases: card drafting, trick taking, and deck combos. The cards themselves depict various fairy-tale characters, each with icons and rules for gaining points. This is my layout at the end of the first game, which I won. The three stars (two points each) indicate I won three tricks out of seven; the hearts (1 point each) and emeralds (1/2 point each) are rewards given by the cards during the last two phases of the game.J won the second game…… and the third.
3 Chapters is a fun, quick game that’s perfect for filler.
It was a good game day. We won’t be able to all meet together for the next three weekends. It was nice we could get together before an extended break!
