Saturdays are nice. Liz and I went to see the new Avengers movie. Great! Then we relaxed at home for a while. And then we met up with Emily and Drew for dinner and games. Their kids had apparently gotten some new games and were excited to play with me.
Hoot Owl Hoot! 2-4 players
Eleanor has gotten so much more talkative. She was insistent we start with her game. It's a very simple cooperative game for kids. It's a little like
Candyland, but you work together and you have to think. There are 6 owls on a path to the nest. The path is set with a pattern of spaces made of 6 different colors. You shuffle the deck and everyone starts with 3 cards. On your turn, you play any one of your cards to move any owl to the nearest space ahead of it of the color you played that isn't occupied by an owl. This means if you plan right, you can make large leaps by working together to cover up similar colors. The only time you can't play a color is if you have a sun card in your hand. In that case, you play the sun and advance the sun on the time track. After playing a card, you draw a new one. If you can get all the owls back in the nest before the sun rises, you win.
I love this kids game. It's not just doing what the game tells you and the choices you get matter. Sure, it's basically just a puzzle, but I'm fine with that. That's the kind of game I'd want for my kids. The kids were pretty keen on making good moves. Elanor lost focus on optimization near the end when she had the opportunity to move owls that were close to the nest. Overall, we lost. I really wanted to play again, but it was time to eat and Miles wanted to play his game.
Cauldron Quest 2-4 players
Another cooperative game. You are trying to get ingredients into a cauldron to complete a potion. To do so, you need to get the 3 correct ingredients into the cauldron before the evil wizard blocks all the paths. The ingredients start on the outer edge of the board and are also hidden so you don't know which are the three you need. The wizard moves around the board in the middle purple ring. On your turn you roll the two action dice. One die determines if you interact with the ingredients or wizard. The other die tells you how to interact. If you roll an ingredient/wizard with a number, you move an ingredient/wizard the number indicated. If you roll a wizard and a lightning bolt, you randomly choose a token that will block one of the ingredient paths. If you roll an ingredient and a lightning bolt, then you have a chance to roll three standard black dice to either reveal an ingredient, swap two ingredients, or unblock a path. You call which you'd like to do and then roll Yahtzee style until you get the proper combination. In this case it would be all evens, all odd, or a sum of 12.
It's a good game for kids, but not as good as Hoot Owl Hoot!. It gives you choices some of the time, but often, since the ingredients start hidden, the choices don't really matter much. We won this game and pretty quickly, but I felt like all the choices that did matter were obvious choices to us all. If I were a kid still, I would probably like this one better because of the theme.
After that game, the kids had to go to bed. We chit-chatted and they took turns getting them ready for sleep. Eventually, Drew was free to play so we started off with
Bohnanza. It may have been the best game of this yet. It was a close game. Liz beat me by two points and Drew wasn't far behind. As we were finishing up Emily was also free so we played the game she requested I bring:
The Hare & the Tortoise. Good fun. We only did one lap. Liz won again and the rest of us had a three-way tie for last. We then moved on to...
TSCHAK! 2-4 players
I
had heard about this game a few times, but paid no attention to it.
Sometime later I heard about how the play worked and I was enticed. I
needed to get the game just to see how well it played.
In this
game, you are each building teams of adventurers to storm different
levels of a dungeon. The first three levels each have a prize and a
monster. The last level is just gold. Everyone starts with 3 random wizards, knights, and dwarfs, but also 1 artifact. Most of the cards
have different numbers (some wizards have question marks which mimic the highest wizard played and
artifacts only multiply the lowest value by 2). Each of the three
levels of the dungeon has you building a team of 3 from the deck you
have. You can never play the same type of character in a team. After the
teams are revealed (each level has you revealing in different ways),
the highest sum wins the treasure and the lowest gets the monster. Every
new level has you making teams from the cards you have left. On the
last level, everyone has one card left and gold is given to the top three
cards. Now comes the most interesting part. Once that round is done,
everyone passes their set of cards to the left and you go through a new
dungeon. So the hands are the same, but now a new person owns it. Once
you have each played with every hand of cards, the game ends. Treasures
add to your gold and monsters subtract. The highest pot wins.
This
mechanic of no new hands is so interesting to me. Everyone can still
build new teams out of them, but we all know a little about the cards in
other people's hands. The fact that monsters and treasures have
different values add to the mystery as well. If I know I have a medium
hand, do I put all my best together to try for the best treasure, or do I just
make sure I never get any of the horrible monsters? I also love the art
on this. It's reminds me of a slightly gritty
Dragon's Lair.
This was a great game. I started with the "great hand" and when I did get the "bad hand" it was at a time when I kind of wanted the bad hand. I blew everyone out of the water on this one, but we all had a good time with it.
Both Emily and Liz were getting tired and had work in the morning so we closed on a game we knew would be short.
Escape: The Curse of the Temple 1-6 players
Goddamn
it! Someone come unlock me! Escape is a cooperative game where you are
trying to escape a temple as it is crumbling down. Think the opening
scene of Raiders. In order to leave, you need to explore the temple to
find places to insert enough magical gems to make it easier to leave the
exit when the exit tile is found. You each simultaneously roll your
own set of 5 dice to do actions and move through the temple
while the 10 minute soundtrack timer plays in the background. Oh, and
you need to make it back to the center room twice before the doors slam or else you lose one of your dice.
This game is awesome and is almost always played twice. I have pretty
much all the expansions and made a lovely little insert to accommodate
this. It's a game with lots of stress and lots of yelling. So much
yelling, it gets a bit hard to hear the soundtrack. I had to make an
exaggerated soundtrack so it was easier to tell when the doors were
about to slam.
We played with Drew's set (so not the set I'm showing you). We added the cursed rooms and the Illusions expansion. For those not in the know, when a cursed room gets revealed, the player who revealed it draws a curse card. This will hamper the player in some way: no moving, no talking, one hand, etc. You can roll to remove it, but that takes time and a little bit of luck. The Illusion rooms (green tiles) get removed from play every time the doors slam. This means the maze of rooms you make gets a little harder to traverse and it's possible to become trapped.
Our game started fine, but got a little worse each step of the way. Emily was cursed to be mute and lost a die when she got stuck outside the center room. I went to go help her and Drew and Liz did more exploring. With my help she was able to break the curse, but this left us little time and we had to make it back to the center again. We all made it back and then we had one focus: make it out. We stayed together and found the exit. We each needed to roll 4 keys to get out. Liz was out first and she game an extra die to Emily. Emily was next to get out and she gave her extra die to Drew. I got out next and was about to give Drew an extra die, but the final door slammed and we lost him forever. We were all too depressed about his death to go on, so we dropped a large rock on ourselves to end the pain and torment.
Good times. Good times...
Tally: 34/152 Bonus: 9/50
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