Monday, July 17, 2006

My Idea of Fun

Game Night! Yes, my dorkhood dreams are fulfilled on the 3rd Saturday of every month when my house is set upon by a group of our friends who are willing to play euro-games with the Spousal Unit and I. Here's what went down:

We started out by playing a game that our friend Markus brought called Chronology. While not a "euro-game" per se it was a fun, quick game aimed a bit toward history buffs. You start out the game with a card that has an event and the year that the event took place. Each time your turn comes you're read another event card and have to guess where on your timeline this event falls. If you're right, you get the event card and it goes into your timeline for the remainder of the game. In the first round of the game it's pretty easy because you only need to guess "before" or "after" the date of the event you started with. But as your timeline grows you then need to guess "earlier than all my events", "later than all my events", or "between event A & B". Tough when you have dates that are close together. First one to get 10 cards in their timeline wins. Our friend Knitts won.
While 8 of us were playing Chronology, Knotts and Jenny were dueling it out in a game of Magic: The Gathering. I haven't played much Magic but it's recently reared its ugly head in our group and I have a feeling it might be around for some time to come. It's really fun but I haven't played enough to be good at it. I'm going to have to put a deck together so I can bring the hammer down on a few of my friends. I think Knotts won. Shelly joined them for a 3 player game after Chronology ended and I think she was the victor but I can't remember for sure.
As the 3 player game of Magic started, Markus, Sylvia, Beach, and I played a game of Samurai. We got Samurai around Christmas time but have only played it twice. It was great with 4 players. There's plenty of strategy going on but grasping it all still eludes me. During the game you play hexagonal shaped pieces that exert influence over cities on the board which contain 1 to 3 figures of 3 different types- Buddhas, rice fields, & High Hats. When all the land spaces surrounding a city have had player tokens placed on them the players add up how much influence they exert on each of the figure types in the city. Whoever exerts the most influence wins the figure. If two players tie for the most, no one wins the figure and it's just removed from the game. The end-game scoring is kinda funky (it's Reiner Knizia after all). Should any player capture the most (not tied for the most) of two types of figures they win automatically. Any player who captures the most (again, not tied for the most) of one of the types of figures is eligible to win the game. Anyone who didn't capture the most of any type of figure can't win unless no one captured the most of any figure. In our game Beach captured the most rice patties and I captured the most High Hats so we were eligible to win. The two of us then add up the number of figures we captured besides the type we had the most of and whoever has the most other figures wins. I managed to squeak out a victory 4-3.
Meanwhile Knitts, Aim & Mini-Knitts played a game of Bohnanza. The bean game is always a crowd pleaser. It's easy to learn, involves lots of interaction with the other players and has enough strategy to keep your brain busy. I think Aim emerged victorious.
Our game of Samurai ended before the bean game or Magic did so the four of us played a couple games of For Sale. It's one of my favorite filler games. It only takes 10 or 15 minutes to play a game, it's light and simple to learn but has some fun, tactical bidding in the first half of the game and a clever selling mechanism in the second half. I pounded on everyone in the first game but Sylvia beat me on a tiebreaker in the second game.
All of this ended just about simultaneously so everyone regrouped for a final game. Sylvia, Aim and Beach sat down for a game of Ticket to Ride: Europe while the other 7 of us played a heap-big game of Citadels.
It's no surprise that Sylvia- Queen of T2R:E, was the winner of that game.
I had only played Citadels as a 3 player game and it's ok for 3 but was much better with 7. There was a little too much downtime with 7 but I think familiarity with the game would change that. I have no doubt it would be great with 5 or 6 and if you had 8 people who knew the game already I think even that many would be ok. Shelly won just ahead of Knotts who looked like he was going to pull it out. I got destroyed thanks to Mini-Knitts. I told her she can't come anymore.
So, that was game night for this month. Big fun for us, boring reading for you. Unless you like that sort of thing. I do.

2 comments:

Zoe said...

What kind of freaking loser would play Magic, the same kind that would play D&D I bet.

Phollower said...

Yeah, dorks.