If you had seen Jonathan, Diego and myself get all excited when the young lady behind the counter/bar at The Luxe poured Diego his Guinness, the first words you would have thought of were “Sad gits”. Or words to that effect. You might have put the odd more colourful word in for example.

But it doesn’t get away from the marvellous bit of science going on. I’ve managed to find the official video of what I’ve just found out is called the Guinness Surge.

I’ve had Suburbia in my collection for a couple of years now, and never managed to get it to the table. That is until Saturday afternoon, when at long last I did finally get the game to the table.

I enjoyed the game, despite coming first loser. I think Diego enjoyed the experience of playing to a very convincing victory. However Jonathan had a bit of a mare of a game.

My part of the city had a pretty effective money creating engine going. But there was a period mid game where I was not going up on the population track because my reputation was zero. I did hit a negative value for a turn, but I managed to get a tile to negate it and take me to zero. It slowed me down, and after that there was no real catching Diego up.

However Jonathan fell into a similar trap in the later third of the game but with income that meant he found it very hard to do anything apart from cover the money he would lose at the end of each round. It was almost a negative loop feeding into itself. It really did ruin the experience of the game for him. There was also some misunderstanding on how tiles worked, and one or two tiles and their wording.

It was a learning game. Mistakes were bound to be made. It’s a shame that the experience wasn’t pleasurable for John.

I liked the game. It’s definitely a game I’d like to get to the table again.

After building our city districts we wound down with a game or two of Perudo. We were using the 30th Anniversary Liars Dice instead of my Perudo set. But the rules we used we a mish mash of the 2 games. We used the bidding of Liars Dice, and thus the playmat that comes with the 30th Anniversary Edition to track the bids. But the rules from Perudo for everything else.

I love the components, especially the playmat of the Anniversary edition. But it is so let down by the awful, cheap, box it comes in. Why make all the fuss about it being this 30th Anniversary Edition and then cheap out on the box it comes in?

If you are remotely interested in the outcome of the games you can look on bgg here.

Our final game was a few plays of No Thanks! I don’t think Gavin realised the monster he unleashed when he introduced the game to us at the last Monthly meetup. We’ve now introduced it to two more people. I think so we don’t burn out on the game, we will have to switch back to say Red7 or some other quick, light filler game we can end the evening with. Although Perudo has also filled that spot on occasion.

I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but a big big thank you to The Luxe for once again allowing us to use their premises for our gaming. And yet again another fantastic afternoon gaming with 2 of the best people to game with.