With four of us this week, I was keen to try out some of the new games I’d brought back from Essen. We decided upon Industria as we tend to enjoy most of Michael Schacht’s games. The game is about the spread of industrialisation over time and concentrates on five epochs. The course of the game involves a whole series of auctions. The auctioneer draws four cards and auctions them off one at a time. The auction is once-round-the-table and the auctioneer can accept the highest bid or take the card for free (which is also the forced outcome if no-one bids for a card). Once the auctioneer takes a card, the role of auctioneer passes to the next player for any remaining auctions. The cards represent factories, technologies, resources and improvements(bonus tiles). Once the four auctions have been concluded, all players then use resources to build their factories/technologies/improvements and gain VPs for doing so. There are extra VPs available for linking certain factories/technologies together by the end of the game.

In our game, we felt that the final player was at a significant disadvantage as they had little chance of generating cash in the first epoch and this limited their ability to build and gain VPs. Although they begin as auctioneer in the second epoch, the initial disadvantage is hard to overcome. In subsequent games, this perceived problem could well be taken into account in the bidding during the early auctions but it wasn'’ something we anticipated in this first playing. However, as it was only Nige who was the last player, the rest of us didn’t mind too much. This is a game where you definitely need to watch what other players are doing as I found I managed to grab some critical cards for little competition and this enabled me to race away to an unassailable lead. We all felt the mechanics were very good and we enjoyed the game. We just hope the Last Player issue doesn’t turn out to be too significant.