After the 11 am prerelease, Dave and I chose not to play in the 3 pm session – David because he had to go to work, me because I had D&D to run later on! However, we still had some time left, and so we spent it playing a three-player game of London, with Kalum, who had arrived early, joining in. David had played the game before, Kalum was playing his first, and had a lot of trouble with the basic concepts, not being anywhere near an experienced boardgamer.

I resolved to play a small city game, with only a few district piles, and to get as many boroughs as I could. David took a loan on his first turn to grab the central city borough, and went more expansive in his plays. Kalum started out relatively small, but was soon creating a lot of piles of cards… spending a lot of time getting rid of poverty only to have it come back due to many more stacks than boroughs!

I’m sitting at the bottom of the picture, Kalum is to the top left, David is to the right.

I’d also hoped to not take a loan during the game, but David manage to time the Fire Brigade perfectly, and I was forced to take a loan to pay them! I quickly came into the lead in the number of boroughs owned, though Dave was not far behind me. Kalum’s initial five stacks ballooned out to eight, and he’d regularly take 5 poverty after running his city, although the twin Street Lights reduced the poverty (but kept him cash-poor). He needed to take out three loans in total to keep his city running. I was very aggressive in stacking buildings, sometimes not even flipping the previous ones (although they were always worth VPs).

At the end of the game, I was not poor, Dave had constructed four underground stations and I had constructed two, and, as expected, Kalum was the leader in poverty; I’d reduced mine to nothing, after being the poverty leader through most of the game, but the cumulative effect of having more boroughs than stacks had finally paid off.

The final scoring went like this:

Merric 66 (8 vp chits, 6 money, 17 cards, 35 boroughs)
Dave 61 (15 vp chits, 4 money, 17 cards, 28 boroughs, -3 poverty)
Kalum 28 (18 vp chits, 4 money, 14 cards, 22 boroughs, -21 unpaid loans, -9 poverty)