Food Borne Illnesses

I didn't have karaoke this Friday so Liz and I got to running a few errands and we followed it up with dinner at the Corbett Fish House. We brought along...

Foodie Fight 2-6 players
Liz brought this game in from work a long time ago. It's a trivia game for the food connoisseur.  On your turn, you roll a die to determine which of 6 foodie categories to answer. If you get it right, you can fill in one of the three pie spaces for the category on your menu-board score tracker and then roll again. If you get it wrong, your turn ends. The first to fill their menu wins.

Being that neither Liz nor I are connoisseurs, it plays okish. It took the entire meal, but Liz pulled out the win and beat me by one.

This is a fine game, and probably plays better with people who are actual foodies, work in the food industry, or watch Food Network. Some of Liz's friends from work, some of whom also also went to culinary school, love this game. I refuse to play in that situation. It's like trying to win a pee-wee baseball game against the Minnesota Twins. There is a major flaw with this game that should be pointed out. The end takes forever. The rules state that if you roll a category you've finished, you still need to answer the question correctly to get another roll. So if you only have one category left, you are left rolling a while. It would have been nice if they had taken out one of the categories and made a side of the die labeled "You Pick". (wink wink).

Once back home I was still in the mood for something to get my brain juices flowing, like Agricola, or Istanbul, or...

Pandemic 2-4 players
This is the game most people thing of when the think cooperative games. It's the boardgame that the dice game Pandemic: The Cure is based off of. The game starts with all players in Atlanta holding onto a few cards. Most of them have a city on it, a few have special free actions. The board has 9 random cities infected. On a player's turn, they have 4 actions which can include moving (usually to an adjacent city, but there are other ways), adding a research station, giving/taking a city card, removing a disease cube, or curing one of the 4 diseases with 5 of the same color city cards. At the end of a player's turn, they draw two more cards to add to their hand (discard down to 7). Then more cities get infected from the infection deck. If an Epidemic card ever gets pulled from the player deck (there are 4 to 6 of them depending on difficulty), the infection rate goes up, A random new city gets 3 diseases cubes added to it and the infection discard pile gets shuffled back on top of the infection deck. If a city needs a disease cube added to it and it already has 3 of that color, there is an outbreak and the neighboring cities get hit. You win if all the diseases get cured. You lose if there are 8 outbreaks, if you run out of disease cubes to place, or if the player deck runs out of cards.

We played on easy (4 Epidemic cards). We had it pretty easy going and cured 3 of the 4 diseases and then we had a bad epidemic. The random city was Istanbul which caused a double outbreak. and the first card drawn from the infection deck was again Istanbul, which meant we ran out of black diseases cubes. We got hosed by the deck. We had to play again. We reset the board and got new characters. It wasn't as simple as before and we got lucky a few times, but managed to pull off the victory.

If you haven't played this game before, you must. It's a classic. In all honestly, we don't play it too often, but it is such a mainstay, it can't be ignored for too long. It has about 4 or 5 expansion which we haven't touched, but I hear that most are pretty good. I might like the dice version better, but it's hard to tell. They are both pretty good.

Tally: 120/174  Bonus: 30/50