Jump Drive 104, 105, 106

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Chores are done for the Saturday, it’s been raining out there, which cut off a long walk, so, time for a Jump Drive.

As usual, the goal is a 6 turn win, which is 50 points or more by turn 6. This is not that easy to accomplish. My current win rate is about 21%.

Here’s how Game 104 played out for a seventh turn score of 54:

Jump Drive 104

Game 105

I’m over-caffed and over-sugared today, a result of ramping up too fast during the week. As a result, my motivation is ebbing. More caffeine and more sugar isn’t going to help. Or, it might, but the resulting crash tommorrow or worse on Monday would be really bad. Getting another game in seems reasonable as I don’t have the fuel to dig super deep into something else.

This game started out with a really tough call, as I had almost enough Military to pursue it as a strategy. But it would have left me with very little card draw, so I went with the card draw instead. This produced a very slow start for victory points, but set me up to play 8 VPs on Turn 3 alone. With the card draw, I was able to place high VP cards without regard to their faction or synergy. I was beat pretty good a couple of months ago by someone doing this as their first game. It’s a viable strategy, I pulled out a win on Turn 6 with 50 points:

Jump Drive game 105

Game 106

I have this worksheet I made for manually logging Jump Drive games, and this game fills up the second of these sheets. For this game, there was no obvious strategy from the initial hand, so I opened with card draw. While discarding my whole hand on Turn 3 was painful, laying Terraformed World is a pretty good play for that turn. Galactic Trendsetters appeared in the next draw and the game was obvious at that point. I did not expect to win it in 6 Turns, but the score totaled to 54 points, I’ll take it!

Jump Drive game 106

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What to play next?

Deciding what to play next is always a tough call when faced with a closet full of games, all of which were purchased with intent to play. Here's one I'm dealing with the decision.

  • Something New: this means both something new to me and a game which has been published recently, within the last two or three years.
  • Something Classic: I've acquired a number of games properly considered "classic" which haven't yet been played. The current example would be PanzerGruppe Guderian.
  • Something Again: mastery requires constant practice, which means playing games many, many times to allow nuance to appear.
  • Something Vietnam: as I'm on a Vietnam binge. I don't have all the Vietnam games ever published, but I can say that I have a lot of them, and probably more than most people.
  • Something Obscure: as it's fun to poke around in the dustier corners of game design.
  • Something Different: break away from the same old publishers and try a game from one of the new kids on the block. Or, conversely, dip into legacy with a classic tried and true.
  • Something Light: once in a while it's nice to actually finish a game all the way through in one sitting, in an hour or two.
  • Something Heavy: if possible, it's nice to set up something big and complicated which can be left out for days or weeks or even months, for a leisurely stroll through a very large or long game.

There are surely many more ways to choose, but the above method keeps me busy enough, helps me get both breadth and depth into my play, and provides me with a sense of progress.

The odd man out

When there is an odd man out:

  • Have a solo game ready to play.
  • Keep score or advise on a game in progress.
  • Referee a game in progress.