Nige has been wanting to play this again for several weeks. I've not played it for a few years but my memories were that it was a good game that could take a while to finish with those that over-analyse. I'm glad to say that this time out it moved along at a reasonable pace and the enjoyment benefited from this. The players are aiming to build trading empires in Europe and growing their influence by opening branches in new cities and towns, and adding branches in cities where they already exist. Money is pretty tight in the game and there is sometimes difficulty in deciding whether to take income from your city branches or re-investing it into another branch in that city. Players need to balance this with spreading their influence throughout the 10 European regions in the most economic way. As your influence grows, this is translated into victory points by having an absolute majority of branches in a city, opening a branch in a city and having a presence in each region.

Our game was fairly tight, although Mark G got blocked from the southern regions, limiting his game-end bonus scoring. Mark K managed to keep control of quite a bit of the centre and eastern side of the board. Nige managed to cut a swathe through the southern cities, just before I was going to do the same. Even though I said the game progressed smoothly, I did manage one 10 minute turn. Before anyone accuses me of having tortoise-tendencies, I would explain the reason was because the others were forced to move their cars by the police and I had to await their return before carrying out my moves. The extra thinking time did me no good though as Mark proved he was the trading king (and if anyone has seen the prices of the games in his shop, they won't be surprised! -only joking.) A good, solid game which needs to be played a bit more often than it has recently.