Just Keep Playing

Liz and I started the day with breakfast at Off the Waffle. While we waited for our treats we played...

Zombie Fluxx 2-6 players

This takes the same Fluxx formula and adds a crap load more creepers. All the creepers are zombies of some sort. It's easy to get rid of them usually, but a little pointless when they just keep coming. How thematic. It's harder to play this in a restaurant since the creepers fill the table space real quick. It's good and maybe a little better than the original.

We were able to play 3 games. We each won one. We also each lost two. This means there is a goal that can cause both players to lose. I kind of enjoyed that loss.

After breakfast, we chilled at home, but I later went to the parents house to play games. Liz had Red Dress to go to.

We started with Ticket to Ride. We played on the Legendary Asia version. There was a lot of commotion on the right side of the map. This blocked a lot of paths for people. It forced me to give up on a ticket. Darrin won with Becky close behind.
After Ticket we took a short break to get dinner cooking: tater tot casserole. We then began a game of...

Can't Stop 2-8 players

I got this game because I was sick of playing Golf (card game) with Liz's mom. I did some research to find a happy medium type game. Something that is entertaining and doesn't require a lot of thinking, but also a game where you feel like you have a choice over your destiny. A push your luck game seemed great and of all the ones I had heard about, this one came up the most. You roll 4 dice and pair them up to make numbers between 2 and 12. You can only move up 3 of the tracks at a time so if you can't make a pair of one of the tracks you're on, you lose all the progress you've made that turn. Shortly after a few plays, I got the Rollin' Down The Highway expansion and we never play without it. I also got the extra cones for more color choices and to allow for more than 4 players. And with all that new stuff added to the box that can meant only one thing: new insert.

We all did pretty good, except Becky. The one round she got on the board, she was bumped off by Sarah and then me. I was able to build up a number of back-ups and was primed to win on my next turn. This made Sarah push for the win on her turn since she knew it was probably her last. It was her last because she won.

We still had a bit more time before dinner was good to go. We played Mascarade. It was a delightful game. It was difficult to remember any cards people had, making it a laugh riot most of the time. I was smiling so much my cheeks hurt. I won again because people left me alone enough.
We then took a break to eat. Darrin left after grub to get more sleep. Becky, on the other hand, was dying to play...

Caverna 1-7 players

The "sequel" to Agricola. This may actually be my favorite worker placement game. It does away with the cards from Agricola and replaces it with rooms that anyone can get. It also and removes the stress of food since nearly everything can be traded for food without building an oven. It's all the things I love about Agricola without all the things I find so-so. I'd play it more if it didn't take so much time to play. It's no Battle Star Galactica, but it'll take a chuck of your time.

And did I ever get to play it. We ended up playing two games. We each took different strategies in the second game compared to the first. We also all improved our scores in the second game compared to the first. I won both games. Such a good game.  In fact, I'm good for a third game.

Tally: 43/152  Bonus: 12/50

How to Lose a Game in Ten Minutes

After work, Liz was off hanging with some friends in town and Darrin came over to do some hanging ourselves. We went to Gladstone Pub and he brought some of his smaller games.

Zombie Dice 2-99 players

This is a pretty simple push your luck game. The cylinder is filled with a number of dice. The sides of the dice have brains, feet, or explosions. There are three colors of dice: green, yellow, and red. The color of the die tells you what is on the faces of each die (the green have more brains than explosions and the red have more explosions than brains). On your turn, you grab three dice out of the tube and roll them. Brains score you a point and are kept. Feet do nothing, but you will reroll them later. Explosions are kept, but are bad. You can continue to roll 3 dice (replacing any brains or explosions from the tube) or stop rolling. If you stop, you permanently score all your brains. If you keep going and end up rolling 3 explosions combined, then you lose any progress made that round. Once you are done, you put the dice back in the cylinder and it's the next players turn. Once a player reaches 13 brains, they win.

We actually played with the Zombie Dice 2: Double Feature expansion. This adds three special dice with a few new rules. Darrin had a really good turn getting 7 brains in one round. He had a few bad rolls after that, which allowed me to catch up a little. I nearly had him, but I just couldn't stop beginning my rounds with two shotgun blasts. It should be noted that it doesn't help to play dice games on a picnic table.

Rollin' Bones: Pirates of the Caribbean Dice Game 2-4 players

This is more of a kids game than anything. There are no real decisions; you just do what the "dice" tell you after you roll them. I say "dice" because you are more literally rolling bones. The bones are essentially four sided and labeled "bone", saber, shovel, and skull and cross bones. On your turn, you always roll at least one bone. If you roll any skulls, you lose the bones you're rolling and end your turn. If you are clear of skulls, any shovels are added to your collection. Any sabers allow you to take bones that another player has to roll. Any "bones" allow you to add more bones for you to roll from the supply. You continue to roll until you get a skull, roll out on shovels, or roll only sabers and there are no bones to take from a player. Once all the bones have been "shoveled", each player rolls those bones once and the most skulls wins. Pretty stupid, but a time waster.

Again, this is not great on a picnic table. We had each collected 7 of the bones, but he rolled 3 skulls to my 2. Avast!

We finished eating and played the rest back at my place.

Walking Dead: The Board Game players 1-6 players
There are a few different games based off of this property. This one is based off the comic book. I could explain the game in detail, but there isn't much point. The game didn't last as long as a full explanation would. Basically, you are each survivors trying to accomplish three goals at 3 different locations around Atlanta. You move around, leaving a trail of zombies behind you and vie for resources and more followers while trying to survive encounters. The more followers you have, the more dice you have and therefore the better chance you have at overcoming encounters. If you fail too many encounters and take to much fatigue, you die and lose.

I died in 3 turns. Four if you count the turn that got skipped. Darrin had 4 turns and actually wasn't doing too bad. I got a lot of impossible encounters in the start and didn't stand a chance.

I want to like this game because it seems really interesting and different. It just seems too random. There really isn't anything I can do about bad encounters. To get resources or followers, I have to risk an encounter. There really needs to be more balance factored into this. They added balance to the location cards by making the next location harder than the last. They should have done something like that for the encounters. It would make the cards cramped, but it's better than dying on turn three.

Forbidden Island 1-4 players
This was the first co-op game I purchased. I was looking for a non-competitive game for my collection, but didn't want to jump straight to Pandemic. This game is by the same designer and seemed much more casual. The art was a selling point too.

You all play adventurers on a sinking island. You each take turns trying to shore up floods while getting clues (cards) to the precise location of 4 artifacts. Can you collect all 4 before the island pulls you down with it? Each randomly assigned character has there own special ability to make things easier. Some can travel diagonally and others can send messages (cards) to players on different locations around the island. After each turn, players draw 2 cards to add to their hand and draw a number of cards from the island deck to see which locations sink or possibly get lost forever. There are also a number of "Water Rises" cards in the player deck which makes you shuffle the island discard pile and places it back on top of the deck. Not only that, it makes you draw though the island deck a little faster. Things ramp up pretty quick. I love it and I'm glad I got it.

We started one level above Novice to make it more of a challenge.  Darrin played as the engineer and I as the messenger. We started out okay, but as usual things got bad quick. We got really lucky with some of the card draws near the end, but we were able to jump of the island a turn or two before the whole place went down. Sweet!

Elder Sign 1-8 players

I learned about this game though Tabletop and didn't really think about buying it. I picked it up a few months later when I was dying (no pun intended) for more games to play. It's a Lovecraft themed game where you try to banish the horrible things that bump in the night by rolling dice to match symbols on the location cards. You can use other items and spells you gain to help yourself and others achieve the requirements. If you get enough Elder Signs in time, then the Ancient will stay in its slumber. If not, then you can peck away at the beast and hope you have enough supplies to prevent you from going insane or straight up being devoured.

Over time I got two expansions. I made an insert for the first expansion (also my first insert ever) and another better insert for the second expansion. The image shows just the recent insert.

We avoided the newer Gates of Arkham expansion. That bastard is hard. We did play with Unseen Forces. It was pretty much a breeze. We had some close calls, but we were never in too much danger. Getting lots of clue tokens really helps. Darrin also picked up some pretty powerful allies. This is a great game. Hopefully we can crack the right strategy for the Gates expansion soon.

Glen More 2-5 players

This was one of my "grail games" for a while. I learned it through Rahdo and knew it would fill a hole in my collection. I loved the mechanic of last in line moves first and the new take on tile placement seemed interesting. In this game, you are building your Scottish clan by gaining fields, markets, castles, and the like. Each new tile placed in your land activates the adjacent tiles which allows you to generate more resources. There is also a little "stock" market on the board if you are low on a resource or have resources to sell. You do not see this game too often in stores. In fact, I had never seen it. I got this as a belated secret Santa present from Carl. Had he not felt so bad for being late with it, I'm sure I would have gotten and easier to find gift, so it was worth the delay.

Darrin picked up on the game pretty quick. The tiles did not like me in this one. My best options for tiles to take were usually ones with rivers or roads, This slowed down most of my resource production. He had the upper hand on scoring for chieftains and I had the upper hand on whiskey. Since he was able to get a better synergy with his tiles, he was able to beat me by 9 points.
Even though I lost, still had fun and learn a few things for next time. Darrin got a kick out of all of it and dug a few of the mechanics.

So in all, I only won two games and they were both cooperative. Not my day. Maybe I'll fair better tomorrow.

Tally: 40/152  Bonus: 12/50

Twoooo Fiftyyyyyyy!

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

Double, Double Toil And Trouble

Saturdays are nice. Liz and I went to see the new Avengers movie. Great! Then we relaxed at home for a while. And then we met up with Emily and Drew for dinner and games. Their kids had apparently gotten some new games and were excited to play with me.

Hoot Owl Hoot! 2-4 players

Eleanor has gotten so much more talkative. She was insistent we start with her game. It's a very simple cooperative game for kids. It's a little like Candyland, but you work together and you have to think. There are 6 owls on a path to the nest. The path is set with a pattern of spaces made of 6 different colors. You shuffle the deck and everyone starts with 3 cards. On your turn, you play any one of your cards to move any owl to the nearest space ahead of it of the color you played that isn't occupied by an owl. This means if you plan right, you can make large leaps by working together to cover up similar colors. The only time you can't play a color is if you have a sun card in your hand. In that case, you play the sun and advance the sun on the time track. After playing a card, you draw a new one. If you can get all the owls back in the nest before the sun rises, you win.

I love this kids game. It's not just doing what the game tells you and the choices you get matter. Sure, it's basically just a puzzle, but I'm fine with that. That's the kind of game I'd want for my kids. The kids were pretty keen on making good moves. Elanor lost focus on optimization near the end when she had the opportunity to move owls that were close to the nest. Overall, we lost. I really wanted to play again, but it was time to eat and Miles wanted to play his game.

Cauldron Quest 2-4 players

Another cooperative game. You are trying to get ingredients into a cauldron to complete a potion. To do so, you need to get the 3 correct ingredients into the cauldron before the evil wizard blocks all the paths. The ingredients start on the outer edge of the board and are also hidden so you don't know which are the three you need. The wizard moves around the board in the middle purple ring. On your turn you roll the two action dice. One die determines if you interact with the ingredients or wizard. The other die tells you how to interact. If you roll an ingredient/wizard with a number, you move an ingredient/wizard the number indicated. If you roll a wizard and a lightning bolt, you randomly choose a token that will block one of the ingredient paths. If you roll an ingredient and a lightning bolt, then you have a chance to roll three standard black dice to either reveal an ingredient, swap two ingredients, or unblock a path. You call which you'd like to do and then roll Yahtzee style until you get the proper combination. In this case it would be all evens, all odd, or a sum of 12.

It's a good game for kids, but not as good as Hoot Owl Hoot!. It gives you choices some of the time, but often, since the ingredients start hidden, the choices don't really matter much. We won this game and pretty quickly, but I felt like all the choices that did matter were obvious choices to us all. If I were a kid still, I would probably like this one better because of the theme.

After that game, the kids had to go to bed. We chit-chatted and they took turns getting them ready for sleep. Eventually, Drew was free to play so we started off with Bohnanza. It may have been the best game of this yet. It was a close game. Liz beat me by two points and Drew wasn't far behind. As we were finishing up Emily was also free so we played the game she requested I bring: The Hare & the Tortoise. Good fun. We only did one lap. Liz won again and the rest of us had a three-way tie for last. We then moved on to...

TSCHAK! 2-4 players

I had heard about this game a few times, but paid no attention to it. Sometime later I heard about how the play worked and I was enticed. I needed to get the game just to see how well it played.
In this game, you are each building teams of adventurers to storm different levels of a dungeon. The first three levels each have a prize and a monster. The last level is just gold. Everyone starts with 3 random wizards, knights, and dwarfs, but also 1 artifact. Most of the cards have different numbers (some wizards have question marks which mimic the highest wizard played and artifacts only multiply the lowest value by 2). Each of the three levels of the dungeon has you building a team of 3 from the deck you have. You can never play the same type of character in a team. After the teams are revealed (each level has you revealing in different ways), the highest sum wins the treasure and the lowest gets the monster. Every new level has you making teams from the cards you have left. On the last level, everyone has one card left and gold is given to the top three cards. Now comes the most interesting part. Once that round is done, everyone passes their set of cards to the left and you go through a new dungeon. So the hands are the same, but now a new person owns it. Once you have each played with every hand of cards, the game ends. Treasures add to your gold and monsters subtract. The highest pot wins.
This mechanic of no new hands is so interesting to me. Everyone can still build new teams out of them, but we all know a little about the cards in other people's hands. The fact that monsters and treasures have different values add to the mystery as well. If I know I have a medium hand, do I put all my best together to try for the best treasure, or do I just make sure I never get any of the horrible monsters? I also love the art on this. It's reminds me of a slightly gritty Dragon's Lair.

This was a great game. I started with the "great hand" and when I did get the "bad hand" it was at a time when I kind of wanted the bad hand. I blew everyone out of the water on this one, but we all had a good time with it.

Both Emily and Liz were getting tired and had work in the morning so we closed on a game we knew would be short.

Escape: The Curse of the Temple 1-6 players

Goddamn it! Someone come unlock me! Escape is a cooperative game where you are trying to escape a temple as it is crumbling down. Think the opening scene of Raiders. In order to leave, you need to explore the temple to find places to insert enough magical gems to make it easier to leave the exit when the exit tile is found. You each simultaneously roll your own set of 5 dice to do actions and move through the temple while the 10 minute soundtrack timer plays in the background. Oh, and you need to make it back to the center room twice before the doors slam or else you lose one of your dice. This game is awesome and is almost always played twice. I have pretty much all the expansions and made a lovely little insert to accommodate this. It's a game with lots of stress and lots of yelling. So much yelling, it gets a bit hard to hear the soundtrack. I had to make an exaggerated soundtrack so it was easier to tell when the doors were about to slam.

We played with Drew's set (so not the set I'm showing you). We added the cursed rooms and the Illusions expansion. For those not in the know, when a cursed room gets revealed, the player who revealed it draws a curse card. This will hamper the player in some way: no moving, no talking, one hand, etc. You can roll to remove it, but that takes time and a little bit of luck. The Illusion rooms (green tiles) get removed from play every time the doors slam. This means the maze of rooms you make gets a little harder to traverse and it's possible to become trapped.

Our game started fine, but got a little worse each step of the way. Emily was cursed to be mute and lost a die when she got stuck outside the center room. I went to go help her and Drew and Liz did more exploring. With my help she was able to break the curse, but this left us little time and we had to make it back to the center again. We all made it back and then we had one focus: make it out. We stayed together and found the exit. We each needed to roll 4 keys to get out. Liz was out first and she  game an extra die to Emily. Emily was next to get out and she gave her extra die to Drew. I got out next and was about to give Drew an extra die, but the final door slammed and we lost him forever. We were all too depressed about his death to go on, so we dropped a large rock on ourselves to end the pain and torment.

Good times. Good times...

Tally: 34/152  Bonus: 9/50

Working On Our Résumés

After Liz got home from some errands she suggested we play one of her favorites.

CV 2-4 players

I saw a play through of this game on Rahdo's Youtube channel. It's basically the theme of the Game of Life mixed with the dice mechanic of Yahtzee. You roll dice to gain cards that represent events in your life. These events can help or hurt you by having you roll extra dice or paying extra symbols to keep the cards. After I saw the video, I knew Liz would love it. I had seen in online forums that it was one of the harder games to find in the States. I had planned to order it online somewhere and give it to Liz as a birthday present in a few months. When I saw it on the shelves of Rainy Day Games it was an instabuy. It is just as great as it seemed and Liz does love it even if she almost never wins. Now that I think about it, most of the games she loves she rarely wins.

Since we were playing today with only the two of us, we agreed to not include the expansion Gossip. It makes the game a little more cutthroat. As usual Liz didn't do so well. I came out amazingly: 89 to 29. The dice just seem to hate her. After the cards were cleared, Liz wondered if the game would ever treat her as a friend. She wants to not like the game, but she knows she'll always come back to it. Could this be considered physiological domestic abuse?

Any other day and we would have played a few more games, but we had a TMBG concert to go to. It was great.

Tally: 32/152  Bonus: 7/50

Ballroom Blitz

More games at work today. Bryan said he wasn't going to be able to make it because he didn't want to be eating while playing. Then he looked at the games I brought. He was back in. We had to wait for him to get back from the getting food so Sarah suggested we play a quick game of Hong Kong or as some may know it...

Stress 2, 3, 4, 6, or 12 players
From her explanation, I knew this would be a game I was bad at and/or hate. You each start with 3 hands of four cards. You can look at one hand at a time. You can swap one of the cards in a hand with any of the four cards that are in the center of the table. The first player to get all their hands to be 4-of-a-kind and call "Hong Kong" is the winner. This sounded a lot like Speed (aka Blink) and Pit mixed together. I've never won a game of Speed. I've also never one a game of Pit, but I did ruin a game by forcing it into a standstill.

I didn't take any pictures during the game because it's obviously fast paced. I was only able to get one hand completed. Adam and Sax got two done. Sarah won the game. Yeah, not my game.

We were kicked out of our room because another meeting couldn't get their room's phone to work. We moved to a tinier room, but Bryan was back in time to start...

Mascarade 2-13 players
After getting Avalon to work and having hope for Coup, I decided to crack and get this game. I had seen it played and really liked it, but didn't see it ever hitting my table if I couldn't make the two similar games I had work. Since I had OK'ed the game for purchase in my mind, it was just a question of when. One day as I was headed to Liz's parents, I was texted that I didn't need to be there for another hour. Given a free hour to burn while driving, I went to Rainy Day Games. They also threw in some promos for it.

In this game you all start with one character card and 6 coins. Each character has a different ability (usually involving gaining coins). You all start knowing your character. Then all cards are flipped face down. During your turn, you can do one thing: look at your card, swap (or pretend to swap) your card with another players card, or use "your card's" ability. The first 4 turns must be the swap/not swap action. This is to cause a little confusion. The reason "your card's" is in quotes is because you don't need to actually use the ability of the card you have. You can bluff. Hell, since the swapping causes confusion, you could think you are telling the truth, but really you're lying. People can call you on your character announcement by claiming that they are really the character you claim to be. All players in contention reveal their cards and the honest player gets the ability. The liars each pay a coin to the bank. The first player to 13 coins (there is a character exception to this) wins. It is an easy game to understand, but takes a while to play well. You can't just be concerned with what card you think you have. You also need to worry about the card you know the other players have.

For our game, there were a number of times that we let characters keep their knowledge of their character, giving them an easy play on their turn. By the end, we started to be a bit more aware and staved off some wins by swapping cards. I was in contention to win and Bryan pointed it out to Sarah who "swapped" cards with me. She really shuffled the two meaning I had a 50-50 shot at the win. I called Bishop and was right.  Win for me. It was an okay first game and I'm sure it will only get better.

Tally: 31/152  Bonus: 7/50

You Can Be A Winner

When I got home, Liz was already there. Normally she's still at work by then. Since we had some time before going to bowling, I suggested we play one of the games we hide behind the other games on the shelf.

The Game of Life 2-6  players

I hate this game. I didn't mind the version I had as a kid. The one from my memory was a bit bubblier and had less math to do. The version Liz got from a thrift store is an older more annoying version. You spend most of the time in debt, stocks are riskier, and in the end you'll probably end up in old folks home. I'd say it's more like real life, but that's misleading. Neither are anything like real life, it's just this one is a tad bleaker and requires more work on the player's part. I play games to have fun, not do stupid work.

This time around didn't treat us too bad. I was a doctor and Liz was a lawyer. I won the lottery and took a polar expedition. Liz got into a number of car accidents. I had no kids and sued Liz. Liz had two boys and got sued by me again. I finished with a little over 3 million. Liz barely cracked a half million.

Even though I crushed it (because I totally had a hand in the matter), I'm still not a fan of this game. This version has a number of little rules that seem pointless, the 1,000 and 5,000 dollar bills are nearly the same color of pink, and there is some creepy clone kid all over the board. They want you to think they are your sons, but that's a lie. There are way too many opportunities for sons than there are daughters. One of them is probably the real son sure, but the rest have been sent to infiltrate and destroy. He's just sitting and waving to lower your guard, draw you in. The army of child clones will kill and your spouse if you don't get enough money to make it into the underground bunker. Now that makes the game interesting.

Tally: 30/152  Bonus: 6/50

The Big Engine That Couldn't

A busy week for us. Work, meetings, bowling playoffs, laser tag. This meant little time for games. I did play Pairs a few times since it's easy to teach, portable, and quick, but that's it. Today, after finalizing some bowling documents, we had the freedom to do what we wanted. We headed to Café Yumm! and played...

Star Realms 1-2 players

The first time I played this was at Red Castle Games during Tabletop Day 2014. I could have gotten it then, but thought about getting a bigger game and did. After that, it was all the buzz and pretty hard to find for a while. A couple of months later when I saw it on the shelves I picked it up. It's a deck building game where you are trying to blow up your opponent instead of earning victory points. Each card you purchase has a faction and most will give you a bonus if you can play other cards of the same faction. And that's where the excitement is. Can you clean out your dead weight and get it packed with bonus after bonus? So fun. I've picked up a few small expansions too.

We started with one of the new expansions in the Gambit set that allows for co-op play. We worked together to fight the Pirates of the Dark Star and lost. It was ugly. Pirates are mean. Then we tried again against the Nemesis Beast. We did much better. Finally, we played the game the old fashioned way and fought each other. Liz was merciless the first game. I demanded a second game so I could actually find some entertainment from it. It was a much closer game, but she still blew me up. C'est la vie.

After cleaning up our table, we walked to a new game store that was nearby downtown: Time Vault Games. It's been there for at least a year, but it was new to me. It's pretty small, but they still had a number of things to ogle. We got a new game that Liz was excited about and a missing mini-expansion for Carl that I wasn't able to find when I was getting him a birthday present earlier in the year. Purchases made, we stopped by the apartment real quick and then headed on over to Becky and Carl's.

Ticket to Ride 2-6 players
Liz and I picked this up at the now defunct Unplugged Games on the way to dinner at HUB. We planned to play something new while getting pizza and knew that Ticket wouldn't flop. I didn't realize that the board for the game would be so big. It nearly took up the entire table. We probably looked a bit silly, but we didn't care. It was really fun. Liz really likes this game. I enjoy the game, but find that the game spites me by giving Liz objectives she's already completed and I get objectives that are nearly impossible.

It's a pretty basic game and great for newbies. On your turn you can either grab colored train cards, play train cards to lay down trains to connect cities, or grab more tickets. Tickets give you objectives of cities to connect (e.g. San Fransisco to  Miami). The more you complete, the more points you get. The more you don't, the more points you lose. The game starts to wrap up when players run out of train cars to add.

For today's game with Becky and Carl, we played with an expansion map that allows for team play: Team Asia. Most of the rules stay the same, but you have more trains to place, you have shared (for your team) and private cards, and you can't communicate strategies to your partner. That last one is what makes this hard. I was excited to play with Liz instead of against her to see if I could ride her coattails. She always does so well at this game. Even though both Becky and Carl were completely new to this game, they railroaded us. Liz didn't lift me up it seems; I just brought her down to my level. Now she knows what my games of Ticket to Ride feel like.

Deus 2-4 players

I saw a few pictures of this and thought it was pretty. Apparently, other people online disagree. I think it may be that it looks a little like the Terra Mystica board and you know how I love my TM. I found a video to see how it played. You play cards in one of six categories to advance your civilization or discard cards to gain the favor of one of six gods. When you play cards you get to add meeples to the board and you also activate all the other cards you played in that category. When you discard cards, you gain more meeples and a special benefit that gets better based on how many cards you dumped. It's part area control, part engine building, part resource management. The game ends when either all the barbarian camps on the modular board are removed or all the temple buildings get built. My favorite part of the game is that it is so easy to teach and yet it's a pretty deep game. You have to plan the order of the cards you want to play to get the most out of them while trying to do the math to see if you'll have the resources to even play the cards you want.

I had only played this game once before about 2 or 3 months ago so it was a little harder to teach since I was refreshing myself at the time. It could have been worse, but everybody seemed to get the gist. By mid-game we all had our little strategies and had clear goals in mind. It was a close game. I ended up winning by 3 points. All of them really enjoyed the game and can't wait to play it again. Neither can I.

Tally: 29/152  Bonus: 6/50