Happy Mother's Day! Once Liz got off work, we drove over and had dinner with her parents and sister. They had steak and I had a burger. After we consumed the grub and after Thom and I picked up sweet treats at the nearby DQ, we were ready to game. Madre had first pick and she picked...
Farkle 2+ players
My
parents introduced me to this one on a trip to the Grand Canyon a few
years ago. A number of people also know this as Ten Thousand. It's a
push your luck game where you roll six dice to try to make one-off
combinations that score points. If a roll doesn't earn you more points, you farkle and lose anything you gained that round. If you use all your
dice, you can (and in some versions must) reroll all the dice to earn even more. The highest
score past 10,000 wins.
I'm not sure when this started, but whenever we play we start talking in
a voice reminiscent of 1930 baseball announcer or Groucho Marx,
sometimes a mix of both. We give a running tally of the points accrued
so far or elaborately describe how their farkle is the worst farkle by
far. I find the game kind of boring since I have very little control, but the
voices make it playable.
It was a tight race for everyone except Thom for a while until we got to around 7,000. At that point Liz cleaned up. She got some really lucky rolls in a row. None of us came close.
Diamonds 2-6 players
I
had no intention of ever getting this game. I had heard a lot about it
on podcasts and didn't think much of it. It's a trick taking game. If
you've ever played Hearts, Spades, or Rook, it has the mechanics of
those. I'm not a fan of any of those, so I didn't think this was for me. Intentions can easily vanish when
you pace a game store for 2 hours.
Guardian Games
had their usual end of year sale where nearly every game is 30% off. I
can't pass up a deal like that. The thing is, the previous days the
items were 20 and 10% off pregressively. This means they have less
inventory on the third day. I had wandered around the store for a long
time debating and spying. Keep in mind, at the time, I still had a
"no buying games on my wishlist" policy since Carl had yet to give me
his secret Santa present and I was also celebrating Xmas with my family
two weeks later. This reduced my options to games I wanted but not on my
wishlist. I could get expansions to games I had just recently received
or games I have heard really good things about but never really intended
to buy. Since I didn't want to find a way to include
Farmers of the Moor into the
Agricola box nor did I want to get an expansion to a game I
had never played, I had little left in the store as options. I puzzled
over
Qin for a while, but passed on that. I left with an expansion to
Hive that I was only ever going to buy if it was on sale and Diamonds.
It was well worth the buy. It would have been nice is the design wasn't so fancy. It can get hard to tell the difference between suits and between numbers if you don't have eagle vision.
In this game, start with a deck of 60 cards (15 of each suit) and deal everyone 10 cards. Everyone also has a little safe that acts as a divider. The dealer has everyone pass 1, 2, or 3 cards to the left and then play begins. Just like in most trick games, the start player plays any card in their hand. Everyone plays a card in that suit if they have it. The highest card in that suit wins the trick meaning they get the played cards in a pile next to them. If you don't have the suit of the trick, you can play any card you want. The winner of the trick starts the next one. Once all cards have been played the round ends, the cards are tallied, and the next round starts. I left out one thing for this game: the diamonds. You see, there are these plastic diamonds that you can earn during the game. Depending on the suit, you get to take different actions: diamonds let you add a diamond behind your safe, hearts let you add a diamond in front of your safe, spades let you move a diamond from the front to behind your safe, and clubs let you move a diamond from in front of another player's safe to in front of your own. You take these actions when you play a non-trick suit or win the trick. When cards are tallied, the person who had the most of each suit takes that action. Ties get you nothing and if you took no tricks you take the diamond action twice. After everyone is the dealer once, the diamonds in front of your safe are worth 1 point each and the diamond inside are worth 2 points each.
I've never won this game. I've gotten close, but most people have a bad judge of who's winning. They see diamonds clumped in front of people's safe and forget about what's inside them. I tend to keep pretty close track, at least to know who the leader is, but not if I'm leading them. Liz is really good at this game and even better at acting like she's nothing to worry about. This game wasn't much different. I kept getting bad hands and she would get pretty decent hands. I was able to make that work for me eventually. I only ever had one round where I took tricks and I took a lot of them. I was able to keep a pretty low profile and most of the diamond stealing was between Thom, Carol, and Sarah. When all the diamonds were revealed, I had beaten Liz 42 to 40. I knew Liz was doing well, but I didn't think I'd do better. Yippie!
It was getting late and the parents were out. Sarah and Liz were up for one more and we had a go at...
Qwirkle Cubes 2-4 players
We got this from
Time Vault Games
in downtown. I pointed it out to Liz. She picked it up and held it
under her chin while giving me a puppy dog look. How could I turn that
down?
It plays a lot like regular
Qwirkle,
but with no privacy and has you rolling. When you pull your 6 cubes from the
bag, you roll to see what you get. At the start of your turn, you can
reroll any of your cubes. This curbs the fact that other players can see what you have a little. Each cube has only one color, but every symbol. This
means you can only roll new symbols, but not new colors. You can make plans based on what other colors players have. If you know another player has a lot of green, you might avoid making the 5 cube long set of circles that doesn't include a green circle.
Liz started out in the lead, but the sisters got a bit too focused on their own dice to notice that their moves would give me a qwirkling opportunity. It was neck and neck between Liz and me with Sarah trailing by about 15. I was able to grab the last qwirkle and luckily get rid of all my cubes first.
Both Liz and I like this version a bit more than the original. You
never feel like you are doomed to be stuck with nearly the same group of
shapes as the last turn. Since you can roll, you usually have a shot at
eventually getting what you want.
Tally: 37/152 Bonus: 9/50
No comments:
Post a Comment