Labor Day games with Grey and Hilary

After my long weekend of playing games Hilary and I slept in on labor day and tried to decide what to do with ourselves. Go to the gym? Clean up the apartment? I know! We could invite people over to play games! So we made some calls and discovered that not everyone we know waits by the phone for us to invite them over. Grey was the only one who was free, so he came on over and we hauled out and played the following:

Dominion
First we played a game of Dominion aka Shuffling: The Game. The randomly chosen card environment included the Laboratory, which is pretty much Hilary's favorite card (she pronounces it "lab-OR-a-tor-ee", Bela Lugosi style). She merrily added a bunch of these to her deck while Grey and I played around with fancy new cards. Sometimes the old familiar strategies work best.

Scores:
Hilary - 37
Chris - 28
Grey - 24

Game time: 30 minutes

Race For the Galaxy
Hilary and I have played a couple dozen games of 2-player Race for the Galaxy, but she'd never tried it with more people. She finally agreed, but only if the third person was a guy.

Wait a minute, what were we talking about? Right, right, a game.

Hilary did quite credibly in her first 3-person game, especially considering we added the goals to the game, which I don't think she ever played with either. She drew a nice set of alien cards, including a card from the new expansion that she described as "oh my god, the BEST CARD EVAR" (the Alien Monolith, pictured). I actually thought she had won (and I knew damn well I hadn't) when the game finished, but Grey managed to pull it out.

Scores:
Grey - 38
Hilary - 30
Chris - 19

Game time: 30 minutes

Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation
Hilary was ready to take a break from playing, so broke out Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation (Deluxe Edition) - a game whose name takes longer to say than the game does to play. I'd played it a few times a year or so ago, but had just recently bought a copy myself.

The game play is similar to the classic game Stratego: each player commands forces with different powers and and strengths, but you can only see your own pieces. Each player controls 9 pieces, and each piece has a unique power making some pieces more effective against certain other pieces. As one would expect in a Lord of the Rings game, the Fellowship player is trying to get Frodo to Mordor, while the Sauron player is trying to kill him. The movement in this game is restricted, so once a opponents piece "passes" one of yours, it is difficult (or even impossible) to "back up" and engage that piece (think of pawns in chess).

In this game, Grey managed to slip Frodo by me as I moved several of my pieces forward too aggressively. Frodo strode boldly into an unoccupied Mordor to win the game.

Scores:
Grey (Fellowship) - Win
Chris (Sauron) - Loss

Game time: 30 minutes

Candamir: The First Settlers
Settlers of Catan has recently become fairly popular in the United States. It is now playable on X-Box Live and it was the top selling "Toy and Game" for Amazon in 2008. In Germany, however, it has market penetration like Monopoly does here. And like Monopoly, its popularity has spawned innumerable spinoffs. Unlike Monopoly, however, these spinoffs aren't just the same game with new names for everything, they are different games - often almost unrecognizably different.

Candamir: The First Settlers is just such a game. In this game, players are exploring a map looking for resources to bring back to their village to gain victory points. Along the way, they have to fight bears, snakes, and wolves, gather herbs to make potions, and gain experience and items to make themselves more effective.

Grey and I played a 2-player game, and my immediate impression is that it would probably work better with more players. It's a decent enough little game, though possibly a little long for what it is (which actually could be used to describe Settlers too, so I guess they have that in common). We both wandered around collecting resources (it does have a pretty cool card-based movement mechanic), but Grey ended up with most of the items (the shield, the axe, and the bow), which turned out to be a lot more important than I anticipated. As a result, I had a lot of trouble getting past hazards while by the end of the game Grey was dispatching bears in single combat without breaking a sweat. Just like in real life.

Scores:
Grey - 10
Chris - 7

Game time: 150 minutes