3/13 - Playbysitting at Alana and Thorsten's

Our good friends and gaming buddies Alana and Thorsten recently had a baby boy (CJ). As per usual with first time parents they are being run ragged, so Hilary and Alana made a date to go to a local spa for a massage and hot tub soak while Thorsten and I watched the baby and played some games, and then we all played a bit once Hilary and Alana returned.

Battle Line

I brought a few 2-player games to try out with Thorsten. The first one I pulled out was the Reiner Knizia classic (well, as classic as a game under 15 years old can be) Battle Line.

In Battle Line players are forming 3-card poker-type hands one card at a time in 9 different spots on the titular line of battle. There are 6 colors and 10 ranks in each color, and players try to put together the best hand (where Straight flush > 3-of-a-kind > Flush > Straight > High card) in each "battle" first player to win 5 total or any 3 in a row wins the game.

Astute readers may have noticed that the connection to "battling" in this game is as tenuous as the connection between Uwe Bol and quality cinema, but it makes for some decent card art (on some very high quality, nigh-waterproof cards - thanks GMT!), and gives the whole "win 3 in a row" thing a reason to exist.

This game (and the next) were new to Thorsten, and played in a somewhat distracted manner as we took turns holding and distracting the baby, and a couple breaks to try to put him down for a nap and to start his training regimen for Olympics 2024 (assuming they make "full-contact-almost-being-able-to-roll-over a sport).

Tigris and Euphrates

Alana and Thorsten actually got me Tigris and Euphrates a couple years ago for my birthday. I've only played it a handful of times as Hilary isn't a big fan, and it was towards the beginning of my "buy-everything-now-now-now!" phase, so it could get lost in the shuffle. It does play equally well with 2 as with 3 or 4 in my opinion, so I brought it along to see if we could get a game in.

When it looked like CJ might nap for a while (spoiler alert: nope), I set the game up and started teaching. Once CJ informed us of his other plans, we decided to try it anyway. Tigris and Euphrates is another Reiner Knizia game, considered by many to be his best, in which players each play the heads of a different people in an extremely abstracted representation of the dawn of agricultural civilization in the fertile crescent lo those many years ago.

Each player has 4 leaders - religious (red), agricultural (blue), political (black), and mercantile (green). Over the course of the game, players use these leaders and associated tiles to score points in these 4 colors. At the end of the game, each player's score is equal to whatever color they scored the least in, so players must endeavor to score points as evenly as possible.

I made a huge error as the game seemed to be getting towards its end that almost cost me the game - by making the wrong choice in which battle to pursue first when 2 kingdoms collided, I ceded a huge chunk of territory to Thorsten. However, I managed to recover by using my disaster tiles (which allow a player to destroy a tile and leave a permanent 'dead zone') to stave off the end of the game long enough to recover and I squeeked out a 17-14 victory.

FITS

FITS is another game by, you guessed it, Reiner Knizia. This one was designed just a couple years ago and really needs no better description than "Tetris: The Board Game". It really is about that simple. The only real differences are the variety of pieces, the fact that you can't slide a piece sideways to get it below something already played, and the fact that there is no time pressure other than people coughing pointedly if you are taking too damned long.

The game plays in 4 scoring rounds with slightly different objectives. In the first round you are just trying to get your pieces meshed together as efficiently as possible, a la tetris, but in future rounds, you use a scoreboard under your pieces that give you bonus points or extra penalties for leaving specific spaces open. We ripped off three games of this in short order before calling it a night.

Game 1: Thorsten 15, Hilary 8, Chris 3
Game 2: Chris 30, Hilary 28, Alana 22, Thorsten 13 (though he only played 2 out of 4 rounds)
Game 3: Thorsten 28, Alana 28, Chris 21, Hilary 21