The Big Engine That Couldn't

A busy week for us. Work, meetings, bowling playoffs, laser tag. This meant little time for games. I did play Pairs a few times since it's easy to teach, portable, and quick, but that's it. Today, after finalizing some bowling documents, we had the freedom to do what we wanted. We headed to Café Yumm! and played...

Star Realms 1-2 players

The first time I played this was at Red Castle Games during Tabletop Day 2014. I could have gotten it then, but thought about getting a bigger game and did. After that, it was all the buzz and pretty hard to find for a while. A couple of months later when I saw it on the shelves I picked it up. It's a deck building game where you are trying to blow up your opponent instead of earning victory points. Each card you purchase has a faction and most will give you a bonus if you can play other cards of the same faction. And that's where the excitement is. Can you clean out your dead weight and get it packed with bonus after bonus? So fun. I've picked up a few small expansions too.

We started with one of the new expansions in the Gambit set that allows for co-op play. We worked together to fight the Pirates of the Dark Star and lost. It was ugly. Pirates are mean. Then we tried again against the Nemesis Beast. We did much better. Finally, we played the game the old fashioned way and fought each other. Liz was merciless the first game. I demanded a second game so I could actually find some entertainment from it. It was a much closer game, but she still blew me up. C'est la vie.

After cleaning up our table, we walked to a new game store that was nearby downtown: Time Vault Games. It's been there for at least a year, but it was new to me. It's pretty small, but they still had a number of things to ogle. We got a new game that Liz was excited about and a missing mini-expansion for Carl that I wasn't able to find when I was getting him a birthday present earlier in the year. Purchases made, we stopped by the apartment real quick and then headed on over to Becky and Carl's.

Ticket to Ride 2-6 players
Liz and I picked this up at the now defunct Unplugged Games on the way to dinner at HUB. We planned to play something new while getting pizza and knew that Ticket wouldn't flop. I didn't realize that the board for the game would be so big. It nearly took up the entire table. We probably looked a bit silly, but we didn't care. It was really fun. Liz really likes this game. I enjoy the game, but find that the game spites me by giving Liz objectives she's already completed and I get objectives that are nearly impossible.

It's a pretty basic game and great for newbies. On your turn you can either grab colored train cards, play train cards to lay down trains to connect cities, or grab more tickets. Tickets give you objectives of cities to connect (e.g. San Fransisco to  Miami). The more you complete, the more points you get. The more you don't, the more points you lose. The game starts to wrap up when players run out of train cars to add.

For today's game with Becky and Carl, we played with an expansion map that allows for team play: Team Asia. Most of the rules stay the same, but you have more trains to place, you have shared (for your team) and private cards, and you can't communicate strategies to your partner. That last one is what makes this hard. I was excited to play with Liz instead of against her to see if I could ride her coattails. She always does so well at this game. Even though both Becky and Carl were completely new to this game, they railroaded us. Liz didn't lift me up it seems; I just brought her down to my level. Now she knows what my games of Ticket to Ride feel like.

Deus 2-4 players

I saw a few pictures of this and thought it was pretty. Apparently, other people online disagree. I think it may be that it looks a little like the Terra Mystica board and you know how I love my TM. I found a video to see how it played. You play cards in one of six categories to advance your civilization or discard cards to gain the favor of one of six gods. When you play cards you get to add meeples to the board and you also activate all the other cards you played in that category. When you discard cards, you gain more meeples and a special benefit that gets better based on how many cards you dumped. It's part area control, part engine building, part resource management. The game ends when either all the barbarian camps on the modular board are removed or all the temple buildings get built. My favorite part of the game is that it is so easy to teach and yet it's a pretty deep game. You have to plan the order of the cards you want to play to get the most out of them while trying to do the math to see if you'll have the resources to even play the cards you want.

I had only played this game once before about 2 or 3 months ago so it was a little harder to teach since I was refreshing myself at the time. It could have been worse, but everybody seemed to get the gist. By mid-game we all had our little strategies and had clear goals in mind. It was a close game. I ended up winning by 3 points. All of them really enjoyed the game and can't wait to play it again. Neither can I.

Tally: 29/152  Bonus: 6/50