18XX, missed game idea, and Trishula

Firstly, I got to play 18AL tonight. It was the first time I've played that particular game, although the third 18XX game I've played. I felt like I was missing more of it tonight than in previous games. In other games, I've felt comfortable with doing the math, but feel like this time I made some poor decisions due to an incapability to calculate whether I made more relative money keeping stock versus throwing it away. I'm not sure if this is something of just my mindset on a Thursday at 9 p.m. (after a long day of grading, TAing, and colloquium), or something more fundamental to my lack of understanding of the game that I might just be learning now.

Regardless, it's a great "quick" map. We got through an initial game in about 3 hours or so (after rules), which is great compared to other playing times of the series. Louis brought a cool program which didn't work out too well in the end, made the game feel weird for not having your cash in front of you (I never had any *real* idea as to how much cash I had, even when I had $1500). Dunno if I'd want to use it again, but a neat idea anyway.



I realized yesterday that I missed one current idea for a game in my previous post:

-Senate: In this game, each player is a senator in power. They have all just been elected, and have a public platform and a private goal. The public platforms are all fairly standard political statements in different hot topics: alcohol, tobacco, firearms, religion, education, etc. Each player also has a (set of?) secret goals to accomplish while in power: having an affair, making secret money, religion into government, religion abolished completely, etc. If a players' secret objective is outed, they are forced to resign (giving time enough for one more round for all players' to potentially be outed). Players would be trying to hide their secret objectives from others (who could extort them if they figure out what it is) while voting for their public objectives. The chain of extortion would hopefully drive the game. At some point, perhaps there are midterm elections of some description. Points are awarded with less points for accomplishing public objectives, and more points for accomplishing secret objectives.


We'll be playtesting Trishula tomorrow night. I need to create/print out a few things for that to run more smoothly, as well as go over the rules again since it's been several months, but I expect it to go well. It gets really difficult to remember the rules sometimes, because I can't remember which particular thing I'm following - the old way or the new way, I can't remember which is which. Usually, I find out about halfway through a session that I forgot to tell people about/play with certain rules which would make things better, and this can be a really frustrating experience, probably not just for me. I'm hoping to avoid this tomorrow by reviewing the rules a little before again.

Anyway, session report to follow.