Only played this one time since then, but GameNephew loved reading all of the histories of the various alien races, as well as the fact that he won the game we played, as the Parasite. I haven’t counted everything to see if it’s there, but there should be 75 alien race cards, there are 6 hexes (planetary systems, partially under the manuals), LUCRE (the yellow squares mostly covered by manuals, sorry), Flare cards (next to the Space Warp and Hyper Space Cone), Destiny discs, tokens, Moons, alternate planetary systems and the Praw (on the backs of the systems), and the manuals, including the combined rulebook released with Expansion Set 9. The game and expansions span my time working in a game shop, so it captures that period for me perfectly. I feel lucky to still have this, because many yeas ago, I lent it to the guy who was the best man at our wedding, then he got divorced, I moved away from Eugene, and we mostly fell out of touch, but one of the last times we talked-after a period of years-I remembered to ask about it and retrieved the game. It broke down so long ago (and also couldn’t accommodate the expansions) that the box it’s in was a shipping box for Commodore 64 computer software. It’s a testament to how much I loved this game that it’s one of the few I don’t have the box for any longer, in any state. I did finally drag it out for a couple of sessions with GameNephew, who found it fun, but you imagine explaining what adulterers or the lustful are to a ten-year-old under the watchful eye of his parents before you make the same decision. The structure of Hell is defined in the rule book, but you build different routes depending on which types of sinners the deck gives you for hauling.

I thought a different take on the railway-building game might be fun, but we didn’t ever get a chance to play. One of my later acquisition by far, I picked this up around the time my brother met his wife and we were playing Empire Builder occasionally. These three games are sitting loose in the office for various reasons. These are the hot games of the day, as things go around here, anyway. Games not technically in a box in this short round-up.

Autoduel map sectors