On August 23rd, my cousin Josh got married in Seattle. My family - my wife (Hilary), my parents (John and Sally), my 2 sisters (Sara and Marissa), their husbands (Andy and Justin), and their kids (Penelope, Simon, Finnegan, and Mosley) - decided to rent a house for the week in Seattle. Well the adults decided, the kids got dragged along like it or not.
Hilary and I decided to drive up and stay a couple nights with some friends in Portland. Myself being, well, myself, I decided to bring some games along. Myself also being myself, I brought way too many of them, but I figured since we were driving we'd have some room, so what the hell.
What I brought:
Ticket to Ride - A rummy-like game of collecting cards and building routes. Marissa and Sara both really like this game.
Chicago Express - Another train-themed route building game, but one involving the auctioning of shares in the various rail companies. I thought the short play time (~45 minutes) and similar theme to Ticket to Ride might get it played.
Steam - A heavier rail game that I hadn't gotten the chance to play yet. I knew the odds were slim I would get a chance to play it with my family given its length, but I was also meeting some friends up in Seattle, so I hoped I'd get a chance.
Bananagrams - A speed Scrabble variant that is quick, easy to teach, and that I knew that Sara liked.
Dominion and Dominion: Intrigue - This award-winning new deck building game is one of Hilary's favorites, and with its simple rules and short playing time, I was hopeful that I could get people to try it out. I also wanted to try it with its brand new expansion.
Small World - Another one I thought I'd be more likely to play with my Seattle friends. Not because it is too terribly long or difficult, but because the theme of different fantasy races killing each other was likely to be too violent and/or nerdy for my family members.
Coloretto - A quick and simple color matching game that is quite easy to teach, but still has plenty of interesting decisions.
Bohnanza - "The best game about bean farming ever created." A lighthearted card trading game in which players plant and harvest different bean crops. Plays up to 7 and not too hard to teach.
Say Anything - A party game in which players try to guess which wacky answer to a wacky question the host of the round prefers. Similar to (though in my opinion better than) Apples to Apples.
Race for the Galaxy - One of my favorite games, particularly since I integrated the Gathering Storm expansion. While fairly fast to play, this game in which players race to accumulate victory points through a host of card-based mechanisms has a pretty steep learning curve, so I didn't think it likely that my family would play, but I was hoping to play it with some of my friends up in Seattle, and possibly with Hilary, who I had previously dragged over the top of said learning curve kicking and screaming.
In addition to that, Hilary and I stopped at Funagain Games in Ashland and while we were there we picked up Polarity because magnets are cool.
August 15th-16th: Visiting John and Holly in Portland
Ah Portland. Land of good, cheap food, lax zoning laws, and randomly distributed strip clubs. We stayed with our friends John and Holly here for 2 nights, as did Sara, Andy, Penelope, and Simon.
The first night there we enjoyed some of John and Holly's terrific cooking (Gazpacho and glazed pork tenderloin), and after the kids had gone to bed I pulled out Say Anything. As I have previously carped on about, Say Anything works best when everyone knows each other, and as all of us in the game knew each other pretty well, inside jokes abounded, and fun was had by all.
Scores:
Holly - 18
Chris - 17
Andy - 16
John - 15
Sara - 14
Hilary - 12
Game Time: 25 minutes
The next day while Hilary was out discovering the miracle of Fred Meyer, my brother-in-law Andy and I decided to try it my recent acquisition, Polarity. The game seems simple enough - it is a dexterity game in which players take turns leaning their magnetic pieces on the existing magnetic fields of other pieces. Unfortunately, the rules were pretty muddy, and the play felt fairly arbitrary. Andy won by capturing all of my pieces, but neither of us were confident we'd played correctly.
On the other hand, magnets are still cool, and it does take pretty pictures.
Score:
Andy - 1 Zillion
Chris - Negative 1 Zillion
Game time: 20 minutes
August 17th: At Andrew and Yolanda's in Seattle
After a couple days in Portland (which included a fantastic meal at Le Pigeon), Hilary and I finished our trip north to Seattle and got moved in to the very strange house we'd be staying in for the next week.
Once we were settled, we headed over to Andrew and Yolanda's house in Edmonds, about 20 minutes north of Seattle. We know Andrew and Yolanda from high school - in fact a number of our high school friends live in the Seattle area, and a few of them met us at Andrew and Yolanda's that night.
After dinner, we played 3 games of Bananagrams. Bananagrams is a variant of Speed Scrabble. Players get a bunch of letter tiles and they each have to make their own Scrabble-style grid with them. When someone finishes they say "peel" ('cuz they're bananas, get it?), and everyone takes another tile. Continue until there are no tiles left and whoever then finishes first declares their victory by saying "Bananas".
Like Apples to Apples, Bananagrams is a game that tends to wear out its welcome for me around halfway through the third game. Yolanda won the first game. Then I thought I had won the second, but I misspelled a word so I was out and I believe Hilary won that game. The third game petered out without a real winner (see the aforementioned statement about it wearing out its welcome).
Scores:
Game 1 - Yolanda defeats Chris, Hilary, Geoff, and Ari
Game 2 - Hilary defeats Yolanda, Geoff, Ari, and Chris
Game 3 - ?
Game 4 - Profit!
Game time (total) - 45 minutes
As we were finishing our games of Bananagrams, more high school friends, in the form of Brian and Lillian, showed up. Shortly after high school, in the early years of the Magic: The Gathering phenomenon, Brian achieved a measure of fame by exploiting certain card combinations and creating a dominant deck which is still known as "The Weissman deck", or sometimes simply The Deck.
Brian noticed that I had Dominion with me, a game that he hadn't yet played, but was interested in. I was interested to see how quickly he picked it up given his expertise at deck-tuning in another game. Andrew joined us for a three player game (neither of them had played before). We played with a random set of cards from the basic game, and as I expected, Brian fairly quickly cottoned on to which cards were worth acquiring and which were not. I eked out a close game, but it was pretty clear that Brian's learning curve was going to be pretty quick (not to short-change Andrew, who is no gaming slouch either). Unfortunately it was too late to play another game, but I hope to play with him again in the future.
Edit: Brian swears he won this game. Not what I had written down, but as I don't have any memory of the game at this point really, I will note here that the score is contested.
Scores:
Chris - 27
Brian - 24
Andrew - 18
Game time: 45 minutes
August 19th and 21st: Say Anything with old friends in Seattle
Say Anything came out a couple of times while we were in Seattle. Both times involved one or more old friends who we hadn't seen in quite some time. I snapped a couple quick pictures of the games, but I didn't make note of who won either of them, because that really isn't the point. Good game to play while drinking. Not so much good for the remembering who won (on the other hand, not much for the caring who won either).
Gary Busey came up several times in the game we played on Friday. I believe he was first the answer to "who is the craziest celebrity" and then he became a running joke, even more so than he already is I mean.
Players (August 19th):
Chris
Sara
Andy
Hilary
Marissa
Justin
Matt
Game Time: 25 minutes
August 20th: Playing with Mark
My friend Mark has what I think is one of the coolest jobs in the world. He is a graduate student at the University of Washington studying games and social networks. Most of his work (as I understand it), is video game focused - in fact primarily on how communities develop in World of Warcraft - but he enjoys all kinds of games. On Thursday afternoon, Hilary and I went and visited him. Sandwiched around lunch at a really good BBQ place and watching District 9, we played 2 games of Dominion and 1 game of Chicago Express.
First game of Dominion was just with Mark as Hilary perused Mark's wife's collection of crafting magazines and ephemera. He'd played once before, but we played without the expansion as I refreshed him on the rules.
Scores:
Chris - 36
Mark - 21
Game Time: 30 minutes
Hilary joined us for the second game, in which we included the Intrigue expansion. Hilary's "favorite" card, the Witch was involved. See, I put quotes around "favorite" because really she hates that card. See what I did there? Dominion is pretty light on ways to directly affect other players, and the Witch is probably the card that lets you attack other players most directly by putting Curse cards in their deck, cards which not only clog up their deck, but are -1 victory point at the end of the game.
Anyway, in an attempt to show my cleverness, I tried to win without using the Witch, and lo and behold I did. It helped that the Moat (which allows players to ignore an attack card) was in play.
Scores:
Chris - 48
Hilary - 32
Mark - 20
Game time: 45 minutes
After Dominion, I pulled out Chicago Express. In Chicago Express, players compete in a series of auctions to buy shares of railway companies and then run those companies from the east coast towards Chicago.
I spent my first couple of turns consolidating ownership of one of the companies. This turned out to be a mistake as I found myself without enough money to participate in future auctions, and additionally I did not take enough turns developing my railway line, so my income was lower than Mark's or Hilary's, compounding the problem. What had seemed a clever strategy proved my undoing. Mark, meanwhile rode a diversified portfolio to a pretty comfortable win.
Scores:
Mark - 96
Hilary - 76
Chris - 57
Game Time: 60 minutes
August 21st: Dominion with Marissa and a different Mark
My dad and his friend Nina wanted to go out and see Julie and Julia, but Nina's husband Mark was clearly unenthused about the idea and he jumped at the idea of staying at the house and maybe playing a game. Marissa agreed to play something as well as long as she could play it while tending a baby. I thought Dominion might be a decent fit - it is fairly short and it doesn't require you to pay super-close attention to what other players are doing.
I played with the suggested starting set of cards to make things as easy to learn as possible. Mark is a fan of puzzles and the puzzle aspects of the game seemed to strike a chord with him. He won by the margin of a Duchy (3 point victory card), that I specifically advised him against taking around the middle of the game. Shows what I know.
Scores:
Mark: 34
Chris: 30
Marissa: 21
Game time: 40 minutes
August 22nd: Small World and Ticket to Ride
Our friend Firas who went to high school with my sister Marissa came over on the 21st and the 22nd. When he first came over, he noted with excitement that I had Small World, but we didn't get a chance to play it that night. When he came over again the next night, I brought it out to play. We were joined by Mark and Justin.
In Small World, Days of Wonder's popular 2009 re-make of Vinci, players select from a number of race/special power combos (randomly determined each game) and try to quickly take as much territory as possible in order to earn victory points. Once a player has exhausted the power of a race, they can put that race into decline and select a new race. The result is a game of rapidly shifting territorial control which, while having a fantasy theme tacked on, actually pretty well simulates the expansion curves of ancient civilizations - The Assyrians expanded until their empire got too large and difficult to manage, and then the Babylonians swept in, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.
Of course in real life this went on until, basically, World War I, whereas Small World is over much more quickly - it lasts between 8 and 10 turns depending on the number of players (the game also provides unique maps for 2, 3, 4, and 5 players, which is pretty nifty).
Scores:
Mark - 108
Chris - 98
Firas - 92
Justin - 90
Game Time: 90 minutes
Later that night, after the guests had gone home, and before Marissa and Justin collapsed into crumpled heaps from their exhausting day (ok, exhausting previous 4 months) of double-baby-wrangling, Marissa requested a game of Ticket to Ride, the one game I've introduced her too that she really liked.
In Ticket to Ride, players are collecting sets of cards in a rummy-like fashion (you can draw cards off the top of the deck or from an exposed set of cards). Instead of drawing, players can lay down sets of cards of the same color to claim routes on the board (in the basic version a map of the United States). Players get points both for laying track and also for completing routes that they draw (and keep secret).
The score of this game was lost in a tragic "I was too tired/drunk to write down the score" accident, but I believe that Firas won.
Scores:
Firas - 1 billion
Justin - 653,235,119
Marissa - 123,456,789
Chris - 12
(scores are approximate)
Game time: 60 minutes
August 23rd: Gulo Gulo with my favorite niece
All right, if pressed, I will admit she's my only niece, but she is pretty awesome. I got her Gulo Gulo for her 3rd birthday, which may have been a bit ambitious, but my mom told me that lately she'd been playing it quite a bit, so the afternoon before we went to the wedding I asked her if she'd play it with me.
Gulo Gulo is probably best described as Candyland with a dexterity element. Players take turns attempting to advance their Gulo (French for adorable wolverine I think) to differently colored tiles. In order to advance, you must be able to grab a small wooden egg of the matching color from a cup full of eggs without causing the "egg alarm" - a wooden stick with a weight on the end nestled in between the eggs - to fall. Kids actually do quite well at this because small hands are a pretty big advantage.
Penelope's grasp on the rules seemed tenuous, though I couldn't help but notice that she was more likely to "forget" a rule when it worked against her. Am I calling my almost-4-year-old niece a cheater? Well, let's just say she is open to creative interpretations. I did my best to keep her within at least the spirit of the rules without being too much of a grown-up about it. I won. No molly-coddling here. I'd dunk on her too if I had more than 7" of vertical leaping ability.
Scores:
Chris defeats Penelope
Game time: 20 minutes
The Road Back - August 24th: 2 games of Race for the Galaxy with Hilary
We left Seattle in the late morning and after dropping Marissa and Justin at the airport, we drove back to Portland to meet our friends John and Holly for dinner. We got into Portland several hours early, so we wandered around the commercial district where we were meeting them, had a late lunch at a Mexican place, and grabbed a cup of coffee at a nice little not-Starbucks (conveniently located 1 block from the Starbucks). In each location we played a 2-player game of Race for the Galaxy.
As I believe I have waxed poetic about elsewhere in this blog, Race for the Galaxy does a great job of cramming a lot of interesting decisions into a pretty quick game, and one that can be set up and played in a pretty small amount of space (Hilary and I have played it on 2 airplane tables). As such, it makes a great game to play at cafes and the like as long as you don't mind a few "what the hell are they playing?" looks.
Being a card game, Race can occasionally fall victim to one player just drawing a great starting hand. The 2 player version is particularly vunerable to this as players generally have more control and so can take greater advantage of their cards. Something akin to this happened in our first game, as I started with Alien Toy Shop and Earth's Lost Colony, a combination that effectively means I can churn out 6 victory points/turn starting on turn 2 and end the game in 4 turns - this is pretty difficult to beat.
Scores:
Chris - 31
Hilary - 22
Game time: 25 minutes
Our second game was another matter. This time our card draws were fairly even, but I made a few errors early on and was not able to recover, and Hilary cleaned up pretty handily. Despite that fact that she probably wins about 45% of the time, she is consistantly amazed when she does win. I keep telling her that she's confusing the fact that I *like* games with the idea that I am in fact any good at them. Admittedly Race is a game I have played a lot, so I've got a pretty decent idea of what I'm doing, but at this point she's played enough to make it a pretty close matchup in the 2-player game.
Scores:
Hilary - 36
Chris - 28
Game time: 35 minutes
So that was our trip, and everything I played on it, all condensed down to one comically long blog entry. If you've made it this far, you're probably deserving of some sort of award. Or perhaps you are my mom. Hi mom!
Thanks for reading!
Hilary and I decided to drive up and stay a couple nights with some friends in Portland. Myself being, well, myself, I decided to bring some games along. Myself also being myself, I brought way too many of them, but I figured since we were driving we'd have some room, so what the hell.
What I brought:
Ticket to Ride - A rummy-like game of collecting cards and building routes. Marissa and Sara both really like this game.
Chicago Express - Another train-themed route building game, but one involving the auctioning of shares in the various rail companies. I thought the short play time (~45 minutes) and similar theme to Ticket to Ride might get it played.
Steam - A heavier rail game that I hadn't gotten the chance to play yet. I knew the odds were slim I would get a chance to play it with my family given its length, but I was also meeting some friends up in Seattle, so I hoped I'd get a chance.
Bananagrams - A speed Scrabble variant that is quick, easy to teach, and that I knew that Sara liked.
Dominion and Dominion: Intrigue - This award-winning new deck building game is one of Hilary's favorites, and with its simple rules and short playing time, I was hopeful that I could get people to try it out. I also wanted to try it with its brand new expansion.
Small World - Another one I thought I'd be more likely to play with my Seattle friends. Not because it is too terribly long or difficult, but because the theme of different fantasy races killing each other was likely to be too violent and/or nerdy for my family members.
Coloretto - A quick and simple color matching game that is quite easy to teach, but still has plenty of interesting decisions.
Bohnanza - "The best game about bean farming ever created." A lighthearted card trading game in which players plant and harvest different bean crops. Plays up to 7 and not too hard to teach.
Say Anything - A party game in which players try to guess which wacky answer to a wacky question the host of the round prefers. Similar to (though in my opinion better than) Apples to Apples.
Race for the Galaxy - One of my favorite games, particularly since I integrated the Gathering Storm expansion. While fairly fast to play, this game in which players race to accumulate victory points through a host of card-based mechanisms has a pretty steep learning curve, so I didn't think it likely that my family would play, but I was hoping to play it with some of my friends up in Seattle, and possibly with Hilary, who I had previously dragged over the top of said learning curve kicking and screaming.
In addition to that, Hilary and I stopped at Funagain Games in Ashland and while we were there we picked up Polarity because magnets are cool.
August 15th-16th: Visiting John and Holly in Portland
Ah Portland. Land of good, cheap food, lax zoning laws, and randomly distributed strip clubs. We stayed with our friends John and Holly here for 2 nights, as did Sara, Andy, Penelope, and Simon.
The first night there we enjoyed some of John and Holly's terrific cooking (Gazpacho and glazed pork tenderloin), and after the kids had gone to bed I pulled out Say Anything. As I have previously carped on about, Say Anything works best when everyone knows each other, and as all of us in the game knew each other pretty well, inside jokes abounded, and fun was had by all.
Scores:Holly - 18
Chris - 17
Andy - 16
John - 15
Sara - 14
Hilary - 12
Game Time: 25 minutes
The next day while Hilary was out discovering the miracle of Fred Meyer, my brother-in-law Andy and I decided to try it my recent acquisition, Polarity. The game seems simple enough - it is a dexterity game in which players take turns leaning their magnetic pieces on the existing magnetic fields of other pieces. Unfortunately, the rules were pretty muddy, and the play felt fairly arbitrary. Andy won by capturing all of my pieces, but neither of us were confident we'd played correctly.
On the other hand, magnets are still cool, and it does take pretty pictures.
Score:Andy - 1 Zillion
Chris - Negative 1 Zillion
Game time: 20 minutes
August 17th: At Andrew and Yolanda's in Seattle
After a couple days in Portland (which included a fantastic meal at Le Pigeon), Hilary and I finished our trip north to Seattle and got moved in to the very strange house we'd be staying in for the next week.
Once we were settled, we headed over to Andrew and Yolanda's house in Edmonds, about 20 minutes north of Seattle. We know Andrew and Yolanda from high school - in fact a number of our high school friends live in the Seattle area, and a few of them met us at Andrew and Yolanda's that night.
After dinner, we played 3 games of Bananagrams. Bananagrams is a variant of Speed Scrabble. Players get a bunch of letter tiles and they each have to make their own Scrabble-style grid with them. When someone finishes they say "peel" ('cuz they're bananas, get it?), and everyone takes another tile. Continue until there are no tiles left and whoever then finishes first declares their victory by saying "Bananas".
Like Apples to Apples, Bananagrams is a game that tends to wear out its welcome for me around halfway through the third game. Yolanda won the first game. Then I thought I had won the second, but I misspelled a word so I was out and I believe Hilary won that game. The third game petered out without a real winner (see the aforementioned statement about it wearing out its welcome).
Scores:Game 1 - Yolanda defeats Chris, Hilary, Geoff, and Ari
Game 2 - Hilary defeats Yolanda, Geoff, Ari, and Chris
Game 3 - ?
Game 4 - Profit!
Game time (total) - 45 minutes
As we were finishing our games of Bananagrams, more high school friends, in the form of Brian and Lillian, showed up. Shortly after high school, in the early years of the Magic: The Gathering phenomenon, Brian achieved a measure of fame by exploiting certain card combinations and creating a dominant deck which is still known as "The Weissman deck", or sometimes simply The Deck.
Brian noticed that I had Dominion with me, a game that he hadn't yet played, but was interested in. I was interested to see how quickly he picked it up given his expertise at deck-tuning in another game. Andrew joined us for a three player game (neither of them had played before). We played with a random set of cards from the basic game, and as I expected, Brian fairly quickly cottoned on to which cards were worth acquiring and which were not. I eked out a close game, but it was pretty clear that Brian's learning curve was going to be pretty quick (not to short-change Andrew, who is no gaming slouch either). Unfortunately it was too late to play another game, but I hope to play with him again in the future.
Edit: Brian swears he won this game. Not what I had written down, but as I don't have any memory of the game at this point really, I will note here that the score is contested.
Scores:Chris - 27
Brian - 24
Andrew - 18
Game time: 45 minutes
August 19th and 21st: Say Anything with old friends in Seattle
Say Anything came out a couple of times while we were in Seattle. Both times involved one or more old friends who we hadn't seen in quite some time. I snapped a couple quick pictures of the games, but I didn't make note of who won either of them, because that really isn't the point. Good game to play while drinking. Not so much good for the remembering who won (on the other hand, not much for the caring who won either).
Gary Busey came up several times in the game we played on Friday. I believe he was first the answer to "who is the craziest celebrity" and then he became a running joke, even more so than he already is I mean.
Players (August 19th):Chris
Sara
Andy
Hilary
Marissa
Justin
Matt
Game Time: 25 minutes
Players (August 21st):
Chris
Hilary
Sara
Andy
Marissa
Justin
Firas
Amy
Lars
Game Time: 40 minutes
August 20th: Playing with Mark
My friend Mark has what I think is one of the coolest jobs in the world. He is a graduate student at the University of Washington studying games and social networks. Most of his work (as I understand it), is video game focused - in fact primarily on how communities develop in World of Warcraft - but he enjoys all kinds of games. On Thursday afternoon, Hilary and I went and visited him. Sandwiched around lunch at a really good BBQ place and watching District 9, we played 2 games of Dominion and 1 game of Chicago Express.
First game of Dominion was just with Mark as Hilary perused Mark's wife's collection of crafting magazines and ephemera. He'd played once before, but we played without the expansion as I refreshed him on the rules.Scores:
Chris - 36
Mark - 21
Game Time: 30 minutes
Hilary joined us for the second game, in which we included the Intrigue expansion. Hilary's "favorite" card, the Witch was involved. See, I put quotes around "favorite" because really she hates that card. See what I did there? Dominion is pretty light on ways to directly affect other players, and the Witch is probably the card that lets you attack other players most directly by putting Curse cards in their deck, cards which not only clog up their deck, but are -1 victory point at the end of the game.Anyway, in an attempt to show my cleverness, I tried to win without using the Witch, and lo and behold I did. It helped that the Moat (which allows players to ignore an attack card) was in play.
Scores:
Chris - 48
Hilary - 32
Mark - 20
Game time: 45 minutes
After Dominion, I pulled out Chicago Express. In Chicago Express, players compete in a series of auctions to buy shares of railway companies and then run those companies from the east coast towards Chicago.I spent my first couple of turns consolidating ownership of one of the companies. This turned out to be a mistake as I found myself without enough money to participate in future auctions, and additionally I did not take enough turns developing my railway line, so my income was lower than Mark's or Hilary's, compounding the problem. What had seemed a clever strategy proved my undoing. Mark, meanwhile rode a diversified portfolio to a pretty comfortable win.
Scores:
Mark - 96
Hilary - 76
Chris - 57
Game Time: 60 minutes
August 21st: Dominion with Marissa and a different Mark
My dad and his friend Nina wanted to go out and see Julie and Julia, but Nina's husband Mark was clearly unenthused about the idea and he jumped at the idea of staying at the house and maybe playing a game. Marissa agreed to play something as well as long as she could play it while tending a baby. I thought Dominion might be a decent fit - it is fairly short and it doesn't require you to pay super-close attention to what other players are doing.I played with the suggested starting set of cards to make things as easy to learn as possible. Mark is a fan of puzzles and the puzzle aspects of the game seemed to strike a chord with him. He won by the margin of a Duchy (3 point victory card), that I specifically advised him against taking around the middle of the game. Shows what I know.
Scores:
Mark: 34
Chris: 30
Marissa: 21
Game time: 40 minutes
August 22nd: Small World and Ticket to Ride
Our friend Firas who went to high school with my sister Marissa came over on the 21st and the 22nd. When he first came over, he noted with excitement that I had Small World, but we didn't get a chance to play it that night. When he came over again the next night, I brought it out to play. We were joined by Mark and Justin.In Small World, Days of Wonder's popular 2009 re-make of Vinci, players select from a number of race/special power combos (randomly determined each game) and try to quickly take as much territory as possible in order to earn victory points. Once a player has exhausted the power of a race, they can put that race into decline and select a new race. The result is a game of rapidly shifting territorial control which, while having a fantasy theme tacked on, actually pretty well simulates the expansion curves of ancient civilizations - The Assyrians expanded until their empire got too large and difficult to manage, and then the Babylonians swept in, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.
Of course in real life this went on until, basically, World War I, whereas Small World is over much more quickly - it lasts between 8 and 10 turns depending on the number of players (the game also provides unique maps for 2, 3, 4, and 5 players, which is pretty nifty).
Scores:
Mark - 108
Chris - 98
Firas - 92
Justin - 90
Game Time: 90 minutes
Later that night, after the guests had gone home, and before Marissa and Justin collapsed into crumpled heaps from their exhausting day (ok, exhausting previous 4 months) of double-baby-wrangling, Marissa requested a game of Ticket to Ride, the one game I've introduced her too that she really liked.In Ticket to Ride, players are collecting sets of cards in a rummy-like fashion (you can draw cards off the top of the deck or from an exposed set of cards). Instead of drawing, players can lay down sets of cards of the same color to claim routes on the board (in the basic version a map of the United States). Players get points both for laying track and also for completing routes that they draw (and keep secret).
The score of this game was lost in a tragic "I was too tired/drunk to write down the score" accident, but I believe that Firas won.
Scores:
Firas - 1 billion
Justin - 653,235,119
Marissa - 123,456,789
Chris - 12
(scores are approximate)
Game time: 60 minutes
August 23rd: Gulo Gulo with my favorite niece
All right, if pressed, I will admit she's my only niece, but she is pretty awesome. I got her Gulo Gulo for her 3rd birthday, which may have been a bit ambitious, but my mom told me that lately she'd been playing it quite a bit, so the afternoon before we went to the wedding I asked her if she'd play it with me.Gulo Gulo is probably best described as Candyland with a dexterity element. Players take turns attempting to advance their Gulo (French for adorable wolverine I think) to differently colored tiles. In order to advance, you must be able to grab a small wooden egg of the matching color from a cup full of eggs without causing the "egg alarm" - a wooden stick with a weight on the end nestled in between the eggs - to fall. Kids actually do quite well at this because small hands are a pretty big advantage.
Penelope's grasp on the rules seemed tenuous, though I couldn't help but notice that she was more likely to "forget" a rule when it worked against her. Am I calling my almost-4-year-old niece a cheater? Well, let's just say she is open to creative interpretations. I did my best to keep her within at least the spirit of the rules without being too much of a grown-up about it. I won. No molly-coddling here. I'd dunk on her too if I had more than 7" of vertical leaping ability.
Scores:
Chris defeats Penelope
Game time: 20 minutes
The Road Back - August 24th: 2 games of Race for the Galaxy with Hilary
We left Seattle in the late morning and after dropping Marissa and Justin at the airport, we drove back to Portland to meet our friends John and Holly for dinner. We got into Portland several hours early, so we wandered around the commercial district where we were meeting them, had a late lunch at a Mexican place, and grabbed a cup of coffee at a nice little not-Starbucks (conveniently located 1 block from the Starbucks). In each location we played a 2-player game of Race for the Galaxy.
As I believe I have waxed poetic about elsewhere in this blog, Race for the Galaxy does a great job of cramming a lot of interesting decisions into a pretty quick game, and one that can be set up and played in a pretty small amount of space (Hilary and I have played it on 2 airplane tables). As such, it makes a great game to play at cafes and the like as long as you don't mind a few "what the hell are they playing?" looks.
Being a card game, Race can occasionally fall victim to one player just drawing a great starting hand. The 2 player version is particularly vunerable to this as players generally have more control and so can take greater advantage of their cards. Something akin to this happened in our first game, as I started with Alien Toy Shop and Earth's Lost Colony, a combination that effectively means I can churn out 6 victory points/turn starting on turn 2 and end the game in 4 turns - this is pretty difficult to beat.Scores:
Chris - 31
Hilary - 22
Game time: 25 minutes
Our second game was another matter. This time our card draws were fairly even, but I made a few errors early on and was not able to recover, and Hilary cleaned up pretty handily. Despite that fact that she probably wins about 45% of the time, she is consistantly amazed when she does win. I keep telling her that she's confusing the fact that I *like* games with the idea that I am in fact any good at them. Admittedly Race is a game I have played a lot, so I've got a pretty decent idea of what I'm doing, but at this point she's played enough to make it a pretty close matchup in the 2-player game.Scores:
Hilary - 36
Chris - 28
Game time: 35 minutes
So that was our trip, and everything I played on it, all condensed down to one comically long blog entry. If you've made it this far, you're probably deserving of some sort of award. Or perhaps you are my mom. Hi mom!
Thanks for reading!
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Or perhaps I'm your sister. I think it's funny how much you consider whether I will like a game before you bring it. And for that I am thankful! Great blog, great writing, and we had a fun trip!
ReplyDelete~Sara
4-6 year olds are the biggest cheaters! It's okay to call them out on it, that's how they learn! :)
ReplyDeleteGreat blog! I guess I should be more open to more games, mostly so I don't look so rigid all the time in your blog entries! It should be noted, my crappy score at Dominion is partly attributible to that fact that the baby I was tending to seemed to resent that fact that I was focusing on anything other than him (at least, I hope that's why I sucked so bad).
ReplyDeleteI love Penelope with all my heart, but she does cheat. She will play honestly though, if you hold her to it.
ReplyDeleteThat was so much fun! Marissa, I've had crappy Dominion scores *without* wrangling a baby.
Sara, thanks for the TJ's run...