I haven't been posting much lately. Work has been crazy busy, of course.

This last weekend we had gaming Saturday, followed by a chocolate fountain to test it out for at our reception. Sunday was then a movie and lunch out. Lots of visiting with friends and such.

We played Metro, a subway game placed in Paris in 1898. This particular version was brought over directly from Germany and so we had to find English instructions online. Although the beginning of the game was a bit slow with 5 people and there appeared to be a lot of amiguity within the instructions, after the game got rolling it started playing much better and everything turned out fine with the assumptions we made. I think the 5 of us that played enjoyed it. After everyone left that night Laurie and I played it again alone. It played out quite a bit differently, and was fun although arguably much harder because you have more choices and more opportunities to miss stuff.

After that we almost started a game of Hoity Toity (sp?) but more people arrived and we had too many for it. Instead, I think we played RoboRally next a couple of times. I really enjoyed it, although I think it would turned from a random mess of confused robots with 8 people to a careful strategy game with only two players so I'm not sure if we'll try to pick it up at some point.

We played a game of Munchkin with Munchkin Fu mixed in. Something didn't sit well with me in the game, so I was happy to see it end when it did. :)

After that, we were up to about 10 people to play a fun game of Sabateur. Although it plays similar with 10 as it does with 3 or 4, each individual person has less say in the whole map and if you have two pieces you can play by the time you get to go again you may not be able to play the second piece due to changes. The limited number of cards and the small hands also mean it's more likely that one or two people can hardly help their side at all. Curiously, though, it also usually meant that after the first round everyone had a pretty good idea of where the gold was. Six of 9 of use learned that we had been playing a particular rule wrong (a "fix" card with two tools can only fix one of the two -- we'd all played where it could fix both of them -- a distinction that can help nearly guarantee that breaking two or three tools on someone in this size game would keep them out the rest of the game -- in fact, we found that true in many cases since the fewer plays meant you usually had less of an idea whoe the sabateurs were until the round was almost over).

The chocolate fountain distracted us for quite a while as well as gave us all sugar and caffein highs as well as the fall off not long after. We also demonstrated Fjords to a couple of people (well, they played). Again we realized we had been playing one particular rule wrong. Fjords is designed by the same designer as Carcassone (a game we've been enjoying a lot lately). You have to touch two sides and we had been playing where you could just touch one side when laying a tile. We played it Sunday with these rules and actually didn't like it nearly as much.

The last game for the group on Saturday night was Niagara. Again, our copy was directly from Germany, however it came with English instructions and we were playing with someone who had played it before. Interestingly, our box came with a DVD. It's PAL, so we haven't stuck it into our player yet to see what it is, but we are interested. This was actually a pretty fun game, but it can only be played with 3 people (although I'm not entirely sure why -- it seemed like it would play fine with only two). It was quite a bit different that other games and the whole river flowing thing was a bit odd (and our board needs to be broken in a little more for it to be smoother). The plastic inside the box is brilliant with individual slots for every single piece.

Sunday we went to see Underworld: Evolution. It was almost exactly what I would have expected. I think I liked the first one better, but it was more good story. The world they have created is pretty neat, although they seem to have killed off all of the big bad guys fairly easily. It is totally set for another sequel, though, which is cool.

Later on after getting home we picked up Settlers of Catan the Card Game from our mailbox -- it had been sitting there all day Saturday. It's only a two person game but it's really quite a good game. I'm not sure if it's better than the 2-player variant of Settlers of Catan, but it definitely captures the essence and flavor while having it's own, unique gameplay. It isn't published anymore, so we had to pick it up off of eBay.

There was almost no computer gaming or even computer usage for most of the weekend. I think I got maybe 45 minutes on the PSP -- all which I spent either playing Wipeout Pure or downloading stuff for it. I'm just borrowing it, but I may have to see how cheaply I can pick up a copy on eBay. :)

*yawn*

(To give an idea of how busy work is, I've had the 5 minutes of downtime I needed to write this spread out over the last 7 hours. )

Posted by Shane on January 30, 2006 4:00 PM | Permalink