Only One More

Liz's family got together for a nice dinner. I got there early before people started showing up. Becky and Carl showed first and Becky was ready to play. She and I played Sushi Go!. She found it fun and cute and she killed me.
Carl joined in to play Ticket to Ride. We played the US version with the 1910 expansion. It was very tense for all of us. I was almost screwed, but just had enough trains to fix some of the damage Carl caused me. I blew them out of the water.
Ida was antsy to play Pairs and we got 2 or three plays of that in before we had to set up for dinner.
After the magnificent dinner, Becky, Carl and the kids had things to do. The rest of us played Bohnanza. It ended up being a tie between me and Sarah. She had one more card than me in her hand so she broke the tie. Very close.
The parents took a break and started to watch TV while we decided to play...

Kingsburg 2-5 players
A coworker of mine brought this into work a number of years ago. I got to play it a few times, but we never finished a whole game. I liked the way it played and how colorful it was. Once I got into building a collection, I knew this had to be added eventually.

In the game, you are building a kingdom. Everyone has their own set of colored dice. Everyone rolls and the player order proceeds from lowest to highest sum. Each player goes around placing their dice on advisers that they want the favor of. Favors include resources, defense, points, or knowledge. At the end of each season (round), you can use your resources to create a building on your building tree (is it a tree if all building sets follow a linear progression). The buildings give you bonuses in points, defense, dice, and/or resources. Play repeats like this until winter when the monster arrives. You can spend resources for extra defense, but most risk it. If you have enough defense to survive the attack, you gain a prize. If you don't, you suffer a penalty. After 5 years, with each year bringing a stronger monster during winter, the person with the most victory points wins.

I also have the expansion which contains 4 or 5 different modules. We never play with all of them, but usually 1 or 2. I got irritated at the insert and the fact that the cover of the box didn't completely close with the expansion, so I made my own. This insert is probably my absolute favorite. I put a lot of time and effort into it. It's beautiful.

We played with the destiny deck module. It changes a small rule every year. Not a huge change, but it keeps things fresh. We all started on what seemed like similar building tracks. Throughout the game Darrin and I seemed to have horrible rolls, but he was able to make better of the situation. Near the end, I assumed I was going to be Bettlebum with Liz soaring ahead of all of us. The last monster altered that a bit. Only Darrin and I were strong enough to defend. Liz and Sarah took large point penalties. Sarah dropped enough to take her to last. Liz still won, but Darrin wasn't far behind. We all had a great time. You can't go wrong with this game.

Tally: 60/152  Bonus: 14/50