Started the month off with another adventure in Vantage. We completed our mission for a victory ending. Looking forward to playing again.
At the board-game meetup I played a couple rounds of Ruins. It’s a trick-taking game which usually isn’t my thing, but it has some interesting tweaks which I liked. It uses card sleeves and overlays so the cards get more powerful each round. I usually find trick-taking games to be repetitive and not interesting after a few rounds, but with this mechanic the game has a very different feel each time and we discovered very different strategies that could be used. The second game ended in a one-on-one tie-breaker round which I lost without even taking a turn when Robert made the ultimate play using every card in his hand on his first turn. It was brutal and epic. I also lost the first game too.
At the next meetup I played the classic Carcassonne for the first time. I can see how many games since have borrowed or built on the concepts introduced in Carcassonne. I lost.
After Carcassonne we played a couple rounds of a Hanabi. The cover art would have you believe this has something to do with fireworks. That’s a very loose theme–so loose I didn’t know that was the concept until looking up the image. It’s a card game where the only cards you can’t see are your own and you have to work together to play the correct cards in the correct order.
Like most games which do cooperation within restricted communications you end up with game-impacting issues. For example, if someone asks for clarification about a rule, just asking the question might give away a piece of knowledge that they’re not supposed to. Also, once a group has played a few times you end up with a significant amount of implied communication which maybe is intended in the design, but maybe not.
Rather than win/loss the goal is to get the most points. In our two games we ended up with 14 and then 20 out of 25 points.
During Jess’ birthday weekend we played Garden Variety which is another trick-taking game. It kind of highlights the things I don’t much like about many trick-taking games. In particular, many of your turns are spent just throwing away a card for no purpose because you have to play a card and your cards aren’t currently relevant which is both annoying and boring. I lost.
We also played several rounds of Cat Fluxx that weekend and in the following days. The base game, Fluxx, has dozens of themed variations and Cat Fluxx was just released in September. I thought Jess might enjoy the general concept themed around cats since the general concept has a lot of arbitrariness and is not to be taken seriously–like cats. I lost 3 and won 3.
Back to yet a third meetup for the month I got in a game of Heat. I still really enjoy playing. I was pushed to play much more aggressively than I usually play games and I just barely squeaked out a victory in what is probably the tightest and closest race I’ve played yet. It was lots of fun.