Beaucoup de Games

I was too lazy to look up whether or not I spelled that correctly so shove it up your French ass if you've got a problem with it.

Anyway, The Spousal Unit's brother Karrrl came for his annual Christmas visit and this year he even brought his girlfriend Mycuz. I took a week off from "work" to hang out with them and since I do the vast majority of my blogging from "work" I haven't done anything bloggish in some time. At least that's my excuse for this month.

As you can imagine there were many new games purchased for me, by me, and near me for the holiday season. My birthday also happens to be extremely close to the baby jesus's birthday so that lead to additional games. The Spousal Unit and I also purchased a few just 'cause that's how we roll. Since it's been a mercifully long time since I talked about boardgames I'm also going to mention a few that we played but don't own and I'll probably ramble. Continue reading at your own risk. And wear a bib. The drool caused by extreme boredom is bad for your keyboard. I'm going to break this up into several posts so you can ignore several medium length posts about boardgames instead of one really long one.

Anyway:

Shadows Over Camelot: This is a game that our friends Knotts and Knitts own and we have been playing quite a bit. It's fantastic for 6 or 7 people. The players are all Knights of the Round Table and their job is to save Camelot. It's one of the rare games that is cooperative, meaning everyone is playing together to try to beat the game. Well, almost everyone is playing together. There's a good chance that one of the players is secretly a traitor and will win only if the Company of Knights fails. The game board is divided into 7 different quests that the Knights can embark on. Complete a quest successfully to put white swords onto the Round Table, fail and black swords go on the Round Table instead. Successful completion also heals damage and gives you bonus cards but the top priority is to get the white swords.
Each turn you need to start by "Progressing Evil" in the form of drawing a black card (which always does something bad to the group to varying degrees), taking a point of damage (also bad), or adding a seige engine to the Quest for Camelot (still bad). This is basically the game taking a turn against you and it feels like it. After Evil occurs you can then perform a Heroic Action. This is usually in the form of moving from one quest to another, doing something to advance the quest you're in (usually this means playing a standard white card), drawing some white cards, or playing a special white card which will do something extrodinary but there aren't many of them. This occurs over and over until one of the endgame conditions is met: Fill the Round Table with at least 12 Swords (more white than black and the Company of Knights wins), Get 7 black swords on the Round Table (the Knights lose), Fill the Seige Engine area with Seige Engines (the Knights lose) or All the Knights die (yep, the Knights lose then too). I mentioned a possible traitor earlier. At the beginning of the game everyone is given a card that says "Loyal" or "Traitor". There's only 1 traitor card but if you play with 6 or 7 people chances are someone will get it. This Knight only wins if the Company fails. But he needs to be sly about it. If he's called out as the traitor the Company gets a bonus white sword.
This game is HARD. Some people at Boardgamegeek.com complain that it's too easy but we don't find that to be the case at all. Maybe they're smarter than us or something but the Knights lose more often than they win. But it's always close enough that you want to try it again. If you have 6 or 7 people to play a game with (and they're into strategy games) this one is excellent.

Ra: Easily the biggest hit of the holiday season at our house. This is a game we bought for ourselves simply because we got a great deal on it and we're big fans of the game designer. All hail Reiner Knizia!
Ra has been one of the top ranked games at boardgamegeek forever so we had to give it a try. It's a combination Set Collection and Auction game. During the game various tiles are drawn from a bag and placed onto an auction track. Anytime a player "invokes Ra", either intentionally or by drawing a Ra tile, the tiles that are on the auction track go up for auction. Everyone starts each round with 3 Sun Disks (or 4 in a 3 player game) which are what you use to bid on the auction. The Sun Disks are numbered from 1-13 (or 1-16 in a 5 player game) and each disk can only be used once each round. When an auction is won by a player, the Sun Disk that was used to win the auction is added to the auction track for the next auction, although any Sun Disks you win in the current round can't be used again until the next round. That means that even though I may really want the tiles that are up for auction, if I use my high numbered Sun Disk to win the current auction which includes a low valued Sun Disk, someone besides me may win that Sun Disk in the next auction and get a high valued Disk for use in the next round while I get stuck with the low valued one. That makes winning good auctions in the next round tough for me. That's the crux of the whole game; when to use which Sun Disk and what tiles to try to get with it.
About the tiles- this is the Set Collection portion of the game. There are 3 rounds in the game. Some sets of tiles are scored at the end of every round and some only get scored at the end of the game. Some tiles you get to keep from round to round as you try to build certain sets of tiles, others get discarded at the end of each round so you better have collected what you needed before then. There's a delicate balance when a group of tiles comes up for auction between how useful the tiles in the current auction are for your collection and how useful they are for someone else's. Sometimes you'll bid a fairly high Sun Disk on an auction full of tiles that don't do much for you just so you can keep them out of another player's collection. Tactics (hindering your opponent) is as important as strategy (helping yourself).
Once a player has played all of his Sun Disks for a round he's done playing for that round. If everyone has played all their Sun Disks the round is over. The other way a round will end is by filling the Ra Track. The bag of tiles has about 10 types of tiles that you use for your set collecting along with a whole bunch of Ra tiles. Any time a Ra tile is chosen an auction is immediately held. The auction goes around the table once with the player bidding the highest valued Sun Disk winning all the tiles available on the Auction Track. If everyone passes the tiles remain on the track and additional tiles are added until Ra is invoked again. Ra can be invoked as a player's action as well as when a Ra tile is picked. After 3 rounds have been completed and all sets have been scored the player with the most points wins. As always there are much more complete reviews and rules descriptions on boardgamegeek if you're interested.
Ra is one of the best games ever. There's so much tension when deciding whether or not to bid a Sun Disk, how high of one to bid, waiting for a tile you need to come out of the bag knowing that when it does it will make other players want that set of tiles more too. We've mostly played it with 4 players and that's a perfect amount although I'm sure 3 and 5 would be excellent too.

More reviews and comments to come as I get a chance.