Gaming this weekend?

[sraun]

Anyone available for Iron Dragon on Sunday? I've got one, maybe two slots available.

It's one of Mayfair Games crayon-rail games - others of the class include Empire Builder (the original), British Rails, EuroRails, India Rails, Nippon Rails and Australian Rails. Oh, and Lunar Rails (which I haven't seen in person yet).

Comments

[carbonel]

Sure, I'd be interested. (You do have air conditioning, right?)

Why are you aggravated? If you care to explain, that is.

[sraun]

See you at 1PM on Sunday!

Yes, I have air conditioning. Normally set to 75, am willing to set it a couple of degrees lower if concensus requests.

Aggravated because the CEO usually sends us home early on the Friday before a long weekend. He chose not to today. The afternoon has been as slow as I was afraid it was going to be.

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

I have Lunar Rails. It's an ... interesting map. NOTHING is impassable, as there are no open bodies of water. But really rugged terrain--especially Farside.

The most interesting bit, though, is that they do in fact have the *whole* moon. Which combines with the first observation to pretty much eliminate the concept of an Obviously-Optimum Main Line Routing. There are a LOT of perfectly-sensible ways to connect the major cities

FWIW, Iron Dragon is probably my single favorite game in the series. Apparently I'm fond of more-challenging maps.

[sraun]

Have you run into the Iron Dragon computer game? Play against up to five not terribly bright AI's, but the game play is identical. It's also got an on-line mode that I've never used. I once won that one with one spur north of Railla - from Octomare to Okyabanti. There's a downloadable demo that runs about 15 turns.

Steve, WINOLJ and won on Sunday, has a copy of Lunar Rails; he's promised me a look at it sometime.

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

No, I had no idea! Much potential there, as my kids seem to have about 20 minutes' worth of interest in these games and I'm chronically short of opponents....

[sraun]

It's a game I can site and play for hours. The AI's have learned that it's not worth it to build around that one patch of forest if you've got a Dwarf foreman, but they have some really weird play habits (IMAO).

It lets you set different victory conditions - if you set 8 cities & 350 gold, the AI's can't handle it. I played one game to 10,000 gold trying to see if one of the AI's would ever get to 350 - they'd stall in the high 200's or low 300's, and then not move until they got knocked down below 250 gold.