Another recovery day

Yes, another one! Can we stand the pace and it's only mid-December? Short answer: yes we can, of course, especially when the reason is as good as last night's entertainment. We had a great evening with Trevor and Rachael, showing off the lodge, nattering, scoffing pizza and other stuff and (for three of us) swigging wine.

It was nine o'clock before we got down to the ostensible purpose of the gathering, namely playing Canal Mania. Now that is one complicated game as a look at the websites I've linked will show. This was the second edition, the one with Junction Contracts and improved scoring for finishing a canal.

Huh?

/hmm

If you don't want to bother with the other sites, basically the game involves collecting cards to let you build canals with the aid of a variety of the engineers of the time. Once built, you can move goods along them, scoring yet more points. Given the mildly fuddled state of some of us and the complexity of the rule book, it's a tribute to Rachael (who was driving) that we played even an approximately correct version. I reckon her skills as a primary teacher were well deployed.

It was, you'll have gathered, great fun, even if it did keep us up until after midnight. I suspect that with repeated goes the game could become quite addictive. Sheila won in the end, mainly as a result of cunningly building the Leeds and Liverpool canal via Manchester, thus collecting a lot of points for doing so and then a load more for extensive goods movement.

Anyone wanting a copy of this remarkable product can find it on Amazon; seemingly, it was available from the Mercia shop for some time, though quite a while ago.

Any road up, as a result it was half one before our weary heads hit the pillow, so as I say, we've had a pretty quiet day today, pottering about, clearing up the last of the dirty pots from last night and the like.

An early night tonight, methinks. Tomorrow Sheila is doing the WeBS walk in the morning and we're going over to Elanor's in the afternoon to give her a hand with some stuff there.