Tonight we played two games of Union Pacific. This was the first night any of us had played; prior to everyone’s arrival, I started reading the rules. I was about two-thirds complete when people started arriving.
Tonight’s players: Scott, Jim, Jared, Emily. Note: This time, the write-up is almost a week later than the session; I’ll try to keep better notes and update sooner in the future.
The game was a lot of fun; none of us had any real idea how to build up our position. The first dividend card come up very early, so there weren’t any shares played yet. (We’d been concentrating on building rail connections.) The rest of the game was a duel between Emily and Jarred for the El Paso railroad, while a few missteps threw off everyone’s games. (I wrongly built a couple of lines for the Empire line in New York on the wrong track, for example.) I did better than I’d feared, by building up limited shares in many companies, but still came in last. We were interested in trying it again, with all the rules straightened our, so we setup for a second game.
The second game, I expanded on my previous strategy. I bought 1 or 2 shares of many companies early. This was very handy, as I got the sole ownership (1st & 2nd owner’s dividends) for a several companies the first dividend phase, and a couple of sole ownership shares throughout the game. There was more competition for the companies this time. Dad (Jim) built up a railroad, but couldn’t defend his profit from the rest of us– we took his hard work building the network and lined our own pockets. Union Pacific shares were much more competitive; Jarred started acquiring them early and the rest of us were competing for second place. In the end, the competition was so heavy that I wound up playing only one share, to get the 4th place stake in the company. The difference between the 4th place share and 0 is pretty big…
End result: A closer, better fought game. Everyone scored higher than their first game. I managed to catapult from 4th in the first game to 1st this game, while Jarred was consistently a high scorer (1st and 2nd). Everyone had a lot of fun.