Our friends John and Carissa came over on the 7th to hang out, have dinner, and play some games.
Primordial Soup
The first game we played was Primordial Soup, which we had played a couple times in the past. In Primordial Soup, each player plays a family (tribe? clan? petri dish?) of amoebas that are attempting to multiply, survive, and evolve. To survive, you must eat, and what you eat is the waste products of the other player's amoebas. Well, usually - you can also evolve to be able to eat other player's pieces, which is exactly what happened in this game.
John went aggressively after the genes that would allow him to eat other amoebas. At the same time, Carissa went after the genes that would allow her the greatest mobility as well as the ability to escape from John's attacks. As such, John gorged himself on Hilary and my amoebas (mostly Hilary's - see picture), while Carissa was able to flit off to less contested areas of the board and cruise to a pretty comfortable win with 47 points to Hilary's 35, and my 34.
Primordial Soup
The first game we played was Primordial Soup, which we had played a couple times in the past. In Primordial Soup, each player plays a family (tribe? clan? petri dish?) of amoebas that are attempting to multiply, survive, and evolve. To survive, you must eat, and what you eat is the waste products of the other player's amoebas. Well, usually - you can also evolve to be able to eat other player's pieces, which is exactly what happened in this game.
John went aggressively after the genes that would allow him to eat other amoebas. At the same time, Carissa went after the genes that would allow her the greatest mobility as well as the ability to escape from John's attacks. As such, John gorged himself on Hilary and my amoebas (mostly Hilary's - see picture), while Carissa was able to flit off to less contested areas of the board and cruise to a pretty comfortable win with 47 points to Hilary's 35, and my 34.
Candamir: The First Settlers
I'd picked this up for $10 used at Pacificon in September. Candamir is a spin off of the Settlers of Catan franchise, though it has only a little in common with it mechanically. In this game, players are exploring a map looking for resources (wood, ore, and animal hides) that can be converted into goods that are worth victory points (swords, chests, and window coverings). On the way, players can gather herbs to make into potions, have encounters with other villagers and local ruffians which may lead to weal or woe, and may need to fight off bears, snakes, and wolves. It has a bit of a feel of a "kill things and take their stuff" swords and sorcery type game, except without much of either the swords or sorcery. That would all be fine, except for the fact that like its parent game it drags on just a bit too long for what it is, and the game starts to feel quite repetative. Also, the mechanism used to stop the runaway leader problem works by slowing down the leaders rather than helping the lagging players forward, which makes the game go even longer. John won by being first to 10 points.
Addendum: After playing this, I was poking around Board Game Geek for variants that might speed the game up a bit, and I discovered that many copies of the game (including mine) had shipped with an old set of tiles, and that Mayfair (and publisher) had ones available that provided more resources to the players (and thus sped up the game considerably). I emailed Mayfair and they immediately shipped me a replacement set of tiles at no charge, which was very nice of them. Now I just must decide if even an improved version of this game would be worth playing in lieu of any one of the other 100 or so games I have. We'll see.
Oh, and here's the back of the board with John looking crazy:
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