(left: Nelson, right: Blownfreaks)

This day saw the return of Nelson back to OTK, unfortunately into the jaws of Age of Steam sharks.

(pic: Afif)

Afif, the other AOS newbie learning the ropes.

(left: me, middle:kaz)

I did what I normally do and secure the locomotive action early on.

It was a landslide victory for me, my link (green) also went from east to west unmolested. I think it’s all from years of training with Jedi Master friedricetheman. All the newbies also did well and came out in positive territory (no bankruptcies).

rhyen (middle) teaching two newcomers (Go club members?) Boomtown. Elsewhere neulwy plays Pickomino and Coloretto with the casual gamers group.

What to do with more players? Bring out Long Shot, of course! Effendy (right) joins us for this game.

kaz, Afif and Effendy looking seriously at their cards to manipulate the race outcomes.

gleeful thoughts of card manipulation mischief.

rhyen lending a helping hand to Afif

Eight’s Enough wins!

Jimmy (middle) joins for Amun-Re.

I’d only played this game once online, and some ideas were lost in the electronic translation.

End of first Epoch. In the online game, I couldn’t see how farmers were important to secure a flow of income, but it struck me as I took my time to compare the various auction areas.

This is a thinky game.

End of 2nd epoch. I came last in the 1st epoch scoring but rebounded strongly in the 2nd one. In both epochs, the highest scorers were the owners of the areas with the temples. In both epochs the Nile always flooded over before the scoring. If this happens often enough, more competition should have been made for the temple areas. As it is, we were all 1st time players.

Last we did 18Scan, Jimmy, rhyen, jack208 and myself. Some funkiness happened during the auction round and we all ended with unequal proportions of companies. jack208 here have a minor company.

Myself have 2 minor companies.

Jimmy went for 2 public companies, one of which was converted from a private company.

While rhyen went for two private companies and a public company. The 2nd public company came as a result of a takeover of jack208’s public company.

As expected, the SNJ runs generated a ton of cash for rhyen who proceeded to buy out jack208’s VR. The private companies owned by rhyen also helped to generate early cash for the takeover.

Jimmy’s company started slow as he was gambling on generating more cash via his private before it closes. However this causes DSB to underperform due to the lost time. His NSB also suffered from lack of capital and by the time we decided to call it, had financial troubles.

The minors owned by jack208 and myself had an initial strong run, however, we found that there were two problems: the returns generated were inferior to the price we paid for them. By the the minor companies were merged into the SJ railways and realising its one share potential, rhyen’s SNJ was far ahead. We then decided to call it then and there as there was no way to catch up with rhyen’s investments.