Board games have become a more and more integral part of our book club. In fact, maybe I should start billing it as a book club where we happen to play games. The book was The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell. Three word review: Jesuits...in...space!
Stone Age
Before discussing the book, we played a game of Stone Age. It only plays 4, so Hilary started the game with us while Thorsten cooked, then Thorsten took over while Hilary rested her poor tired brain. Stone Age is a worker placement game with dice - players can place multiple workers to collect various resources and then roll dice to see how many they get. The resources are used to pay for the huts and cards you collect for points.
So far for me Stone Age has been a little less than the sum of its parts. it looks nice, has excellent graphic design (both in terms of aesthetics and usability), it has multiple paths to victory and a good amount of interaction - in short everything that should make me really like it, but I always get the feeling I'm just "pushing cubes around". I think it is just because the theme is at once very specific (people in early civilizations collecting resources and building things) and completely detached from the game (what exactly is it supposed to represent when you build a hut with two gold and one stone?). I don't mind my themes being abstract - Ra is one of my favorite games and it's theme is "everything is vaguely Egyptian for some reason" - but Stone Age is thematically very specific: you are trying to develop and grow a Stone Age clan, and the mechanics just don't seem to have anything to do with that.
Small World
In contrast, Small World a game that just seems to get more interesting every time I play it. After half a dozen plays, I feel like I'm just beginning to understand it strategically (though it is pretty simple rules-wise). As the game progresses through its 8-10 turns (depending on the number of players), players will select different race/power combinations, and at different points in the game, different combinations will be more valuable to have than others. Every time I play leaves me wanting to play again so I can try something else. That's a good sign.
Pikomino
Pikomino joins Banangrams in the pantheon of game titles that are fun to sing to the tune of the muppets "ma nuh ma nuh (do do, do do do)" song. It's also about that silly/cute. It's a pretty simple dice game in the vein of Yahtzee - you roll some dice, keep some, reroll the others, keep some more, reroll the others, etc. A lot of luck obviously, but some amount of decision making and interaction as players can steal tiles from each other. Also comes with the bizairre theme of trying to collect the most bar-b-qued worms, but that is detached from the game to the point that you can (and usually do) ignore it entirely (other than to say "come on worm" sometimes when you roll the dice). The combination of lots of dice and nice chunky domino-style scoring titles makes this fun to look at and play, and easy to introduce to new folks.
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