Titus O'Raileagh

I introduced this to a group relatively new to modern gaming recently and totally changed their outlook. Bowled over by new games like Merchants and Marauders they were not expecting much. How can a game “so very old” be so good was the gist of their attitude. Sid Sackson is the answer. He was a genius at inventing games with simple satisfying mechanisms in this case a stock portfolio building exercise around the hotel industry: Predict and influence which chain will benefit from a merger. The Hotel chain theme is not really that important but the elegant simplicity of the mechanic is. This version is not the prettiest, there were some nice versions with plastic pieces in place of the cardboard in the past, but it has a clean simplicity and is perfectly satisfying to play with. It has the classic number of hotel chains but one of them has been re-named Sackson in honour of the games maestro.

Very quick to learn, very portable and quick to play. The components are few and simple but being all wood are very nice to play with. All in all a well thought out simplification of the Civilisation genre, reduced to dice rolling. The score-sheets double as a very effective player aide once an initial grasp of the rules has been imparted.

If, as in my case, a friend has the original and you don’t want to duplicate but still want your own copy of one of the best deck-building systems around. The beauty of this “expansion” is that it is truly stand alone as well as being completely mixable with the original. In my experience the system is addictive and the re-playability ensured by the number or possible combinations of card types available. Once you are familiar with the system it can be played at a fast pace and I’m always happy to play a game or two.