You Genius

Liz and I headed to Eugene to see the Ducks game the next day and to meet up with some friends of hers from college. We were a bit lazy in finding a hotel room so we were relegated to AirBnB. We ended up in the large furnished basement of a nice house. We had time to kill so Liz popped Mary Poppins in the BluRay player and I set up...

MindTrap II 2 players or teams

I got this game in high school as a present. It's pretty much a trivia game where all the questions are logic puzzle or lateral thinking questions. It was a good present, but it's a pointless game for me to play. I know the answers to nearly every question since I've seen or heard most of the puzzles or puzzles like them. Some people remember a bunch of jokes to tell at parties. I tell riddles. The last time I played this game with Liz it was a complete blowout. It stays hidden behind the better games on my shelf.

Liz started and got the question wrong. I then proceeded to answer every question correctly. This made Liz pretty grumpy. Grumpy because she didn't get to do anything but read questions. Back to the cubby on the shelf behind Firenze and Istanbul.

We needed another game to kill time and to get the sour taste out of Liz's mouth. We looked around the room and found a copy of...

Jenga 1-8 players

This was the A Nightmare Before Christmas version of the game. This changes no rules, but does feature Halloween colored blocks. We don't actually own a version of this game ourselves. We have something similar and weirdly stupider that we haven't gotten to yet.

The tower got pretty high. I had a few close calls, but it was Liz that toppled the giant.

Once we finally met up with Amanda and David, we had a nice meal then headed back to their place for more games. I tried to pick out games they'd like. The information I was given about their tastes was that they like Settlers of Catan and hate Ticket to Ride.
We started with Codenames, We played guys against girls. The guys started strong with the first win, but fell apart on the next two games.
We followed that with...

Sheriff of Nottingham 3-5 players
I preordered this one. It may be the only board game I've preordered, if you don't count Kickstarters. It seemed like a bluffing game that I could get people to play. I have other bluffing games, but they never seemed to work for people.

Each player is a vendor trying to get goods through the city gates. They must get them past the sheriff. If you're an honest vendor you've got nothing to worry about. If, on the other hand, you are trying to sneak contraband through, you had better have a good poker face. During a round, one of the vendors will play the sheriff. Every other player swaps out some cards of there hand of 6 cards. The sheriff can watch over this to see what that vendor is getting rid of and some of what they take. Every player, other than the sheriff, loads their bag with goods and hands it to the sheriff. After everyone tells the sheriff what's in their bag, the sheriff has some work to do. He can't just look in any bag. That would be to easy (and thematically a waste of the peoples time). If he opens your bag and you were lying, you keep the stuff you were honest about, but pay a fine and lose the things you lied about. If you were honest and he opens your bag, then the sheriff owes you a penalty for wasting your time. He also has the option of not opening your bag and letting you pass. If this were the whole game, it would suck. What makes it awesome is you can bribe the sheriff, you might say, "Um... Kind sheriff. I've got a shiny 5 piece here with you name on it if you open the baker's bag and leave mine alone."  All sorts of deals can be made. Once a deal is agreed on it is binding and must be followed, unless it is for future considerations. After all the bags have been settled then it's another players turn as sheriff. After everyone has played sheriff 2 or 3 times, then everything is counted up. Contraband tends to be worth more than goods, but there are bonuses for players that have the most of each type of good. Richest player wins.

I played with a mostly honest strategy, but acted like I was lying the whole time. This worked out really well. I was banking so much. I finished in the lead by more than 30 coin.
I like this game a lot, but the 3 player game kind of blows. It's not because the gameplay is worse, but because it requires you to remove certain cards out of a giant deck of cards.

Amanda was devastated by coming in last place and wanted to play another game to make up for it. She picked out Diamonds. I had a lot of crappy hands, but flew under the radar for most of the game. It didn't matter because, true to her word, Amanda got her victory.

Tally: 141/176  Bonus: 35/50