monkey-eating spiders

Finally got to play Dominant Species today as the Arachnids. Despite going to war with the monkeys (Intelligent Mammals) over their catastrophic approach to land management and eradication of our favourite food group (squishy juicy bugs), managed to have a presence in most of the non-tundra biomes and in fact dominated many of them. Admittedly helped by the fact that after the monkeys wiped out a major part of my preferred food supply, I discovered that monkeys were just as juicy as bugs (but I couldn't eat a whole one) as my spiders developed distinct carnivorous tendencies. The final result was 205 points. The fact that I lapped the Insects is only to be expected, but I did manage to lap the Birds twice as well on the score track. Amphibians came second, having successfully colonised the tundra. Admittedly they probably do spend most of the year in frozen hibernation. Had another game of Imperial 2038 earlier in the week. Unfortunately it's a game which assumes players have roughly equal ability, and this wasn't the case. The Brazilian Federation had no checks on it's expansion and ruled the world. Although why the Russian player (who was the second major stakeholder in China) kept attacking China was a mystery to me. I do prefer the original game in the series. There it is a lot more clear that you are not the people running the nation but the armament merchants selling your goods to the various nations and hoping to make a massive profit. Too many people get control of a country and forget that they should be raping the economy to maximise their own profits. End result was two of the players ended up at 150 and 170 odd points, whilst the third ended up with 40. Given this, I don't think I'll grab Outpost at the Milsims sale. It's a bit too long and heavy duty for anyone I'm likely to play with these days, and just settled for Core Worlds (an SF deck-building game). <sigh> Want pretty pieces of cardboard (despite the fact that I'm extremely unlikely to play any of them these days. Then again, it's unlikely I'll be running any of the RPGs I keep getting, all things considered.