The Cartels won, the Government got close. At one point, Sarah (playing FARC) pointed out that all the insurgents had reached their victory conditions. Which meant, of course, that she and I (AUC) were promptly stepped on by the government and the Cartels.

The players and their factions: Ben (Government), Merric (AUC), Sarah (FARC), Garth (Cartels).

By the end of the game, we'd learnt most of the mechanics, although there were a couple of rules we inadvertently omitted. The first was the ability to freely exchange resources and shipments, thus allowing the possibility of bribery. This probably didn't have much effect. The other was the ability to take an additional Limited Op if a Shipment is expended; I'm unsure of how much effect that had on the game.

Mechanically, the game is pretty clean and the player aid cards are very good. We did have some problems with the "Civil Action" that the government can take to regain support in areas – could you only remove one Terror token or change it one level, or as much as you could spend? It looks like (from the playbook) that you can spend as much as you like as part of the action; it's one of the few areas of ambiguities in the rules.

Andean Abyss is an asymmetric game, with one government player and three insurgent players. The insurgents have similar action-types, but they're not identical. There are also a number of restrictions on the actions "must not be in a Support area" and "must have an Underground guerilla" being a couple of the more common. They'd often trip us up; they thematically make sense, but as the restrictions only apply to certain actions we did, it took a bit to get the hang of them.

The biggest problem I had was getting my guerillas back "Underground"; I'm so used to Labyrinth's ability to set them to hidden through movement, that not being able to do it in this game really threw me. The best use of bases is something we'll have to learn.

The game took us about three-and-a-half hours, give or take a half-hour her or there. It looks like it will play a lot quicker once we actually have worked out the mechanics better. The mechanics were pretty easy to learn and apply, although the variations between factions could occasionally catch us out. Alas, I didn't have my camera with me, so my apologies for the lack of pictures.

I'm hoping for another game next Thursday, so we can see how it plays with most of the mechanical learning out of the way.

We played the shorter three-propaganda game, but Garth's Cartels achieved their victory by the last card in any case.

A brief run-down of the major events in the game:

The first propaganda card came up very early; after only three cards, which placed a FARC-only zone in the mountains. We marvelled at the amount of government and cartel cash, as our poor insurgents were badly resourced.

Sarah went into the Lines of Communication and started wreaking havoc with the future finances of the government. Garth kept fairly quiet during this part of the game, as he was getting use to the mechanics. I started going after Sarah, but I was doing very badly at placing my own bases. Ben started to move out his troops and police, but the best use of them was still obscure to him (and us). No-one was close to victory when the second propaganda card came up, but Sarah and Ben were able to swing a couple of areas to their support.

The final stage of the game saw Sarah suddenly get hit hard by my AUC guerillas and Ben's force; at one stage she went down to 1 base to my four (hooray! I'm winning!), but she was able to rebuild to four bases to my three by the time the final propaganda card came up.

Sarah was getting frustrated in the final stages of the game as it became harder and harder for her to actually maintain her insurgency: it seemed just too easy for the government to swing the support back in its direction, particularly in the cities. For a time there, she'd been in a game-winning position, but now she was pretty much in last place.

Garth went on a base-building frenzy, and I discovered just how difficult it was to get rid of them. The Government should likely have been doing more, but it had been distracted by FARC, and its efforts in the late-game weren't enough to destroy enough of the Cartel's bases. Garth moved up to 14 bases (he needed 10 for victory), so even destroying a couple with an airstrike did nothing.

I had all my guerillas out, but actually employing them properly was very difficult; I really wanted to keep some underground but was forced the tempo of the game to activate all of them to attack (generally unsuccessfully); getting them back underground was very difficult.

I was just beginning to see some of the errors of my play when the final Propaganda card came out and Garth won the victory, with Ben just a little behind.