Wildcatters or Drill Baby Drill

In a rather apt game for our troubling times, Richard, Russell, Stefan and I had a go with Wildcatters.

Richard is yellow, Russell red, Stafan blue and I'm green.

Final scores.

Scoring over so many categories makes it tricky to know who is in the lead at anyone point.

Richard has provided this excellent critic:

Thanks very much for playing today, particularly Stefan for stepping up on short notice (not to mention also for being the purveyor of fine fayre to enjoy!) so we had a full compliment. It is possible to play at 2 and 3 players, but 4 is definitely the best experience.

Given that some rules/procedures needed to be clarified and "coaching" time, we did well to get it done in 5 hours. I think this is a four-hour game if players are up to speed.

The game is conceptually very simple:

• Build Rigs
• Drill Wells/Develop Wells
• Transport to a Refinery

Complicating things are the limited number of area cards. Managing the choosing these cards is really one of the most important aspects of game play. I think it's important to feed off others as much as possible. Developing an area by yourself, like Stefan did in Canada, can be very limiting because there are only ever going to be 6 area cards that will ever come up. You really need to position yourself where there is at least one other player with drilling rigs.

I over committed to well drilling/development on turn 1 and then overbid for the Wildcatter so I had no shares of my own to move my oil in other players turns forcing me to feed my Asian oil to Mark. Also, as I was last to place a refinery, I think it was a mistake to place it in Asia as Mark had already placed one there already. Much better to have placed on a white continent like Australia, Africa or Europe.

A lot of oil was delivered to Mark in Asia. I feel it was a collective mistake to have continued to feed Mark's West Asian refinery as this enabled him to build up a big shareholding of his choice. Although how he managed to pay for all the oil going to his refinery without busting and needing a loan in the earlier turns is a bit of a mystery. I guess

he used his first lot of his own oil deliveries there to shore up his own shareholding (ed: correct). This was the decision which set up Mark for the future. Mark was able to purchase a consolidation token every turn and none of us came close to that. (Ed: I had 5 out of the maximum 7 you can potentially have)

Russell was plagued by indecision throughout the game (shocker), but had remarkable clarity and moved with alacrity when presented with the idea (thanks Stefan) and opportunity to completely screw me over by

commandeering my tanker. That was the fastest move he made in the game.... Just sayin'.

The dastardly deed.

Having more than one tanker is definitely a benefit due to global reach and end game workers can help with slapping down a refinery for bonus points.

This game is really excellent and will definitely be slated for replay in the near future.