I'll have my whiskey to go please...

Last night we had a nice crowd: Scott, Ben (The American Pirate), Joseph, JD, and Marty. S, J, JD, M, and I started playing Canal Mania planning to be done by the time Ben got there, but unfortunately he got there 1hr earlier, so he played a spectator for over 1hr (thanks for hanging in there man).

In Canal Mania you are competing to build the best/longest canals, and making the most profitable delivery of goods to the cities in 18th-19th century England. If you like Ticket to Ride and Railroad Tycoon (or Age of Steam), you are pretty much guaranteed a good time. We had a very hard-fought battle with surprising swings in scores, but in the end Marty beat my lead by having a canal monopoly in the south east corner of the map (becoming the sole profiteer of all the goods cubes in that section... he didn't have to share the income for using other players' canals). Nice.

Then Marty and Joseph left before they turned into pumpkins. Ben joined in. So we played JD's copy of Bootleggers. Pretty fun theme (mobsters controlling speakeasies in the Prohibition era), and good area control mechanics. JD, Joseph and I had played before, and my opinion at the time was "It's fun, but it should be better with more players". And it was. Eventhough we (cough...JD...cough) were rusty with the rules, it was still a fun game. It's definitively better with more players. The only thing that made it sort of painful (to me at least because I could have won earlier), was the fact that the game could have ended ~30min before it did if we had played it with the right game-ending conditions. Trimming the extra 30min would have made it even better (specially because it was starting to get late... 1230am... but we pushed on).

At 1230, we pulled out the obligatory "role-selection" game, Race for the Galaxy. It was Ben's first time, and JD's first SLAUGHTERING of all of us. He absolutely destroyed us, using a military strategy WITH both 6-cost developments that provide bucketfuls of VP's for Military strength/planets. It was ridiculous. His score was 37; the rest of us were in the low 20's?

We finished RftG at 1:30am, and Scott's "Hey Ben, now that you know how to play, we can do another quick run of it in 30 min" almost twisted my arm enough to sit down and play again, but we were all tired at this point...and duty was going to call early the next day (today).

All-in-all, it was another great night of gaming. BTW, I got some new games: Monastery (Ragnar Brother's new game), Tribune (an interesting twist on the now tried and true worker placement mechanic...with an ever cool Roman setting), Pillars of the Earth expansion, and Tichu (which I've only played twice, and I think I like it). And btw, the Shogun that I want to bring to the table, is not the classic Milton Bradley Shogun (Scott, Joseph, and I were talking about how they compared).

BTW, yes, I did make the banner (using Photoshop). Joseph asked last night.