Tinners’ Trail and beer …

Steedo invited Keeno and my good self over for some beers on Friday. I suggested that we give Tinners’ Trail a try, as Keeno would give it a go (not really a gamer, but loves Kernow). If I recall correctly Steedo bought it so he could groom Keeno into a gamer. 

So we gave it a whirl and had some beer (more on that in a bit). 

The game plays over 4 rounds. Each round players take it in turns to play an action - costing different amounts of action points - until 10 points are spent. Then scoring for the round is done - the order you finish the round in changes the value of the victory points you can buy. The actions can be build a mine which involves a bidding process (with potentially some bluffing), installing wheel pumps, building boats or later in the game railways and of course selling pasties. The aim is to earn money from mining copper or tin - each round a new price is randomly set for the price of each item. Mining can be expensive as you need to pay to pump the water out - for example if there 2 water tokens in a mine then it will cost £2 to mine each unit of tin/copper out. 

In our game Steedo and Keeno went into an early lead in round one, while I was building mines … in round two I was able to do a fair bit of mining when the price of copper was high … getting into a nice lead. Round three saw Steedo make a push for catching up. However I managed to strip mine the north Cornwall coast - so I managed to stay ahead. Round four was more difficult as there were few mines left and couldn’t mine, so I was worried that Steedo would be able to catch me. However Keeno managed to bluff Steedo into buying an overpriced mine …

The final board - Keeno 132,  Steedo 234 and me on 25something. The game was interesting - lots of elements to balance out - I think I was lucky that I didn’t mine much in the first round, then was able to in the second. I think Steedo was trying to experiment with the various different actions, which hindered his scoring at times. It would be interesting to see how it plays with more players. 

The bees tried were Fullers London Porter - a full flavoured beer - reminded Steedo on the Guinness West Indian Porter. Otter Head - a strong local ale, which we have had before, but suffered by following Ludlow Brewery’s Stairway - a light ale (with Eastern European hops), still a 5% beer which was the best of the night. There was something with peaches in it, but the less said about that the better.

Morts