I think I have a gaming hang-over.

Yesterday I played Eclipse very badly, scarcely remembering the rules let alone any of the game's strategy or tactics. The game also stretched out to five hours, a point that I wouldn't raise except for the fact that it took quite a lot longer to complete thanks to the number of complaints about the amount of time it was taking. You've probably been there, reader, and if you haven't – I envy you.

After a break to relocate, play recommenced with Race for the Galaxy. Historically, I've been pretty bad at Race. However, thanks to an obvious starting hand I mustered a good second-place finish, just a point or two behind the winner. As there was a bit more disruption among the available players – errands had to be run and there was no agreement about what serious game to play next – we then settled in for King of Tokyo with the expansion pack in play and the Panda-kai banned by mutual consent. I mustered a last-to-fall with my Kraken, with the winner only coming through by the skin of his teeth.

We finally settled in to play Avalon Hill's 1997 Princess Ryan's Star Marines, largely because most of us hadn't played it and therefore had nothing against it. Also it promised a 90 minute game, which seemed like a good idea as the time pushed towards midnight. Unfortunately, the people who had played it were trying to remember the game from ten years ago and the rules had a bad habit of ending up at the end of the table with the worst vision, leading to a number of early rules mistakes such as “<” being read as “greater than”.

But that shouldn't be seen as a commentary on PRSM itself. Once I laid my own eyes on the slim rules document, it all looked pretty straightforward. The game can be played with 1 to 6 players, with rules for playing the hazards of the board randomly or under the control of one player. I suspect that PRSM gets easier with more players, but I didn't check to see if or how it compensates for fewer hands. It runs on a distinctly nineties “half a dozen card decks to deal with a few concepts” design, but at least it's not burdened with huge numbers of counters to lose.

Gameplay in PRSM tries to capture the flavour of a rescue mission, with Princess Ryan being rescued by the Star Marines. There's a finite number of marines that are shared out between the players (with a small reserve to compensate for the inevitable casualties), all with a defined rank and fighting power and a special skill. The highest-ranking marine on the table grants their player the right to command the mission and make whatever bone-headed decisions about the route towards the objective they like, although usually that boils down to Shuttles, the direct route, or the scenic route. Obviously the direct route is more dangerous, but it has very navigation hazards, while the Shuttles can only be used a limited number of times. When the bad guys rear their ugly heads, the marine players need to push forward their chosen skirmish party and equip them with weapons from hand, hopefully triumphing over the villains and securing more resources for continuing the mission.

What makes PRSM tick is that the marine players are trying to juggle two other resources along the road. They have a limited supply of time counters and they need to interrogate prisoners to discover which cell Princess Ryan is being kept in. Of course, only the marine who made the biggest contribution to a skirmish is permitted to interrogate a prisoner at the end of the fight, so each player assembles clues on the location of the princess independently. If and when the marines reach their mission objective, each player guesses the location – if nobody gets it right, then whoever took up the lonely task of playing the board wins. Otherwise, victory falls to the player who got it right, or, in the event of a tie, the player who contributed the most to the last skirmish, even if they didn't get the answer right.

There's a bit more complexity to PRSM than that, but bear in mind that 90 minute play time blew out to about two and a half hours and I didn't get to bed until 3am last night. As mentioned, a lack of clarity on the rules caused significant delays, but we also suffered from indecision early on. Our host, playing the bad guys, knocked the marines around quite badly in the early going, slaughtering a quarter of the force and that left us pretty timid for a while. It also might have pushed the marine players to a more co-operative style than the game assumes – certainly, our host complained that we weren't infighting. I didn't win, although I was the mission commander by the end of the game and did correctly guess the location of the princess. But another player made the same guess, so victory actually fell to someone who'd had a relatively quiet game, making the odd good suggestion and helping things along.

I guess we're a Lawful bunch at heart.