Aye, Caribbean!

Sarah came over after her and Liz went to a baby shower. This gave me the perfect opportunity to play a smaller stupid game.

The Simpsons: Bart's Trivia Game 2-5 players
I got this as a present sometime in high school, back in the day when getting me anything Simpson was a good bet. I never played it as a kid. It's pretty much what you expect from a trivia game based on a single TV show. Each player can set a level of difficult at the beginning (1-5). Players take turns answering question. After getting 3 right, they have the opportunity to get a character card. This then starts a Pictionary or charades mini game which earns the player the card and the person who answer correctly 2 free trivia cards. Sometimes you just get the card or get to steal a card for the price of 3 trivia cards and sometimes you have to do a word/letter scramble. It's all based on a die roll. The first player to earn one of each of the 5 character cards wins.

It went pretty much as you'd expect. It plays a little weird since sometimes you're at the mercy of the character card at the top of the deck. I think it wass there way of making a catch up mechanic, but it's very weird and makes the game unnecessarily longer. Eventually we all had 4 characters. Sarah got the lucky roll. The last character card requires answering 2 out of 3 trivia question in a row. Sarah simply got the first 2 right.

As soon as all of this is done, this game is in the donate pile. The rules are pretty clunky and no one in there right mind would want to play this unless they love the Simpsons or they were dared to.

We cleaned up and headed to the parents for dinner with Becky and Carl. After dinner I set up...

Puerto Rico 3-5 players
I got this game as a present about a year or two ago. I mainly had it on my wishlist because it seemed like such a big game. By that I mean it has a large presence in the gaming world. It was ranked the #1 game on Board Game Geek for a good number of years before being knocked down a few pegs. I had never played it, but did see it played during a sale at Cloud Cap Games.

You are each agriculturalist on Puerto Rico. You are trying to make the most fruitful goods business by growing, trading, and shipping corn, indigo, sugar, tobacco, and coffee. On your turn, you select an action. In this game you can only chose actions that haven't been taken that round. When you select it, everyone takes the action (usually), but you get a bonus to the action. Actions range from getting goods, colonists, buildings, money, plantations, and victory points. The game ends when the colonist supply or victory point supply runs out.

This was a okay game. It was basically everyone's first time so there was a lot of "why did/didn't that happen" being asked of me. Everyone but Becky got the hang of it by mid-game. Becky spent most of the game doing one thing wrong or another. In fact, one time see did four different things wrong on one action. She probably had to much wine to play well. I did alright, but made a number of poor decisions. Carl had a good thing going and was able to take the win.
This is a really good game and it's pretty obvious why it's ranked so high. It's got clean mechanics, keeps all the players involved on every turn, and takes a lot of brain power to play well. It's a little annoying that the minimum player count is three. There is a two-player variant made by fans, but this isn't one of those game where a two-player variant works as good as the real thing.

Tally: 177/185  Bonus: 43/50