(no subject)

Has it really been 30 years? Still hurts.

mini-review

London is an interesting and quite fun game. You are building a pre-1900 London, installing all the appropriate landmarks, and scoring victory points. You can buy land on the board (which gives you cards, victory points, a geographic position that may be valuable for the play of certain cards, and will reduce poverty you acquire), draw cards from the deck or a display, play the cards face up in front of you (building the city), or run the city (perform the run actions on each of the cards to earn money, victory points, or reduce the poverty in your part of the city). Nicely dynamic, although if a player gets both "Omnibus" cards in play they've probably won, even if they don't abuse the privilege. [Although I got my revenge by singing Doing The Lambeth Walk, so all's fair.] Usually when you run a city you flip the cards and have to rebuild. Poverty is an interesting mechanic, since you earn poverty for each stack of cards in play, and for each card in hand. Certain cards can reduce your poverty (but not the poverty you earn in that turn as I discovered in my ignorance of the game). However poverty is only measured in excess of the least poverty-stricken player when scoring victory points. To build the city you generally have to discard a card of the same colour from your hand. Discards are on display and my be drawn from, but they tend to leave the game fast (players are also forced to discard if their hand size exceeds 9). A nicely competitive little game, with enough player interaction to keep it interesting, but constructive rather than adversarial. Now that I know the cards and the important rules that I didn't know until I tripped over them, I look forward to another game sometime.