While Mom & Dad were in town we played a few games
We played half of a game of Keep the Heroes Out with Corinne. We were victorious.
Played Harmonies, a game of somewhat-abstracted habitat creation. Given to us by friends for Christmas this was the first time we managed to get it to the table. I’d played once at the board-game meetup in the past. For practice, I read the rules in French and managed to figure it out correctly. I believe Mom won.
At the only meetup I made it to we played a game of Northern Pacific. It’s a railroad-building game in which players bet on which cities the railroad will connect through and then try to steer the construction through the cities you bet on. It has some interesting game-theory aspects to it. It’s played in 3 rounds and each round was very different as players adapted their strategies. I won out in the end.
Played Everdell Farshore at a board-game meetup. It’s a standalone game in the Everdell world. Same base mechanics but several aspects simplified for faster play and easier learning for new players. Rather than set in a forest it’s set in a south-Pacific archipelago. So if that environment is more your thing than the woods you might prefer it overall. I won.
Played through quests 3 and 4 of Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall with my group. We were victorious on both counts. Now headed into Din’Lux to explore the big city.
A friend is restarting a pre-COVID tradition of weekly dinner & game nights on Fridays. We played The Crew: Mission Deep Sea at the first event. It’s a cooperative, trick-taking game of restricted communication. Not my personal favorite of game mechanics, but it was still a good time. We played several missions with a mix of defeats and victories (they get harder as you succeed).
I finally made the effort to corral a group to play some of the many campaign games I’ve purchased over the years. By “campaign game” I mean any game with continuing state from session to session, but focusing on off-the-shelf experiences which don’t require a game master (so not something like Dungeons and Dragons).
I got a group of 4 of us willing to make a reasonable effort to meet approximately every other week. We’ve met twice now and the first rule is to always schedule the next session before we start playing. I figure that gives us the highest likelihood that we actually keep it running.
The group selected Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall as our first game and we’ve played through 3 quests (1, 2, and 16) so far. Victorious in all 3–though by the absolute barest of margins in the third. The monster we were fighting died just as it was about to land the killing blow on our revenant.
At another meetup I played Critter Kitchen. It’s a lighthearted game of gathering ingredients to prepare dishes for a set of food critics. It can be rather frustrating as ingredient gathering depends heavily on what the other players try to collect. So it can commonly happen that you end up with very little while other players collect copious bounties. But it was decent overall. Has enough going on that it would take a few plays to get the full hang of it and has a lot of variability built in to which shops/critics are in each play through. I lost.
The couple who host the regular meetup occasionally hosts all-day events at their home. I was able to stop in for a few hours in the afternoon after the Mathcounts tournament. Lots of turn out this time around. I jumped in to a group that included a 6 year old so we played a couple of simple games. First was Moose Quest. You need to lead your herd of moose on their annual migration. Grow your herd, limit your casualties, cross lands to earn points. To me, the game would have been stronger with a more serious take on the theme. But it’s designed to be more whimsical and goofy. Probably a better design for a target audience of <10. I lost.
Next up we played Taco vs Burrito. This game lands in the same vein as “Exploding Kittens” in that it’s extremely simple, short, with little strategy. Draw a card, play a card, antagonize the other players. I lost.
Next the groups rearranged and I moved onto a more serious game, rather misleadingly so given the art and theme. Fort is a game of improving your play fort to be the best while recruiting kids from the other players to help you. It has a lot more going on that it seems like there should be. We decided that was intentional to play on the idea of kids making up new rules as they go about whatever they’re doing when playing “fort.” I won.
While waiting for other games to wrap up we played a quick game of L’Oaf. I lost.
And I rounded out the evening with a game of Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor. This game is about laying out an ecosystem (in this version, within a moor) and placing animals in your environment. I filled my moor with dragonflies and newts, but didn’t win.
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By quick count, I played ~63 games this year. (I counted unique games in each monthly post I made, so if we played “Cat Fluxx” 4 times in one session I only counted that as 1).
