This week, we decided to have a go at this older Avalon Hill game of controlling the airways over the United States. I have to say I was not initially expecting to enjoy this one terribly much because it seemed like a typical AH game with lots of little cardboard chits and effect charts printed at the edge of the board. I was wrong and was very pleasantly surprised by the game.

The gameboard consists of twelve hubs (major airports), each with three to six domestic spokes attached (minor airports), and one or two foreign airports. The player turn order is randomly determined each round. Turns then consist of a decision on whether or not to be in fare wars, a draw, and an action. Fare wars offer both offensive and defensive advantages during takeovers; however, no profits are made while in fare wars. The draw is a matter of taking two tokens from a cup, which mainly consist of hub locations or spokes, but can also drive certain other events. The location drawn pays income to the owner, with hubs paying higher amounts if a player owns the majority of domestic spokes or controls them all. The actions consist of either buying an unowned domestic spoke, a foreign airport, a jumbo jet, or attempting a takeover of another player's spoke.

Takeovers are the key to the game because each player is vying for majority control or outright control of the hubs. These then give Market Share points (VPs) and the first to get to a certain level of Market Share (with each $1 cash also counting as a point) wins. However takeovers can be expensive and are subject to the luck of rolling two dice (albeit modified by certain aspects the players can accumulate in their favour). Also the event chits can have major effects, as we found out in our game.

Early on, we played pretty defensively, jostling for position and buying up the unowned domestic spokes. Nobody ventured to buy any foreign airports and only 2 jumbo jets were bought and those only late in the game. Mark G was controlling the draw for turn order and he had this uncanny knack of drawing his own marker in first or second place, whereas I seemed to get the brunt of many fourth and fifth place draws. Eventually, Nige who had built up overall control of two hubs on the West Coast went on the offensive big time. He spread Eastwards and picked off another couple of smaller hubs. He only needed to capture Little Rock to win the game but, whereas until then, the dice rolls had been kind, this time they stopped him just short. Unfortunately, this left him very short of cash and that was the time the Fuel Crisis got drawn decimating his position as he had to sell off (count them) TEN of his spokes to pay his bill. To compound his misery, he then took out a loan and got very close to not being able to pay off his interest, due to his subsequent expansion. He waspraying for some income to arrive before his next turn but, instead, another fuel crisis hit and swallowed up all of his assets leaving him with just $1 cash and a $40 dollar loan still outstanding. It was extremely funny. By this time, everyone but me had also taken loans. I still had plaenty of cash and looked in reasonable shape to go on the offensive myself. The dice had other ideas though and every time I seemed to roll 5 or less. By that time, even though I was the only one who looked likely to be able to finish, we had been playing three hours and we had to call it a night. Morally, the victory should have been mine but we agreed to call the game tied.

The game is very prone to the luck of drawing the right location tokens and the blasted dice rolls. Even so, I thoroughly enjoyed the game, as did everyone else. At three hours, this session outstayed what I would expect to be normal, but it was a good evening and so entertaining observing Nige's rise and fall.