3/15 - Some new purchases with Hilary

So as you may have read elsewhere, Just Awesome Board Games is basically my favorite new place in the world, to the point where I have decided to buy games there instead of online despite the price difference. To that end, Hilary and I ordered a copy of Campaign Manager 2008 there for Marissa and Justin. When we went in to pick it up, they were having a "buy-2-get-1-50%-off" sale, so we kinda accidentally bought Word on the Street, Cardcassonne, and for good measure we put in our pre-order for the new Dominion expansion. The more we buy, the more we save! A couple days later, we sat down to try a couple of them out.

Word on the Street

Pulled this one out first. It's a game that is designed to be played by 2 teams, but can just as easily be played by 2 players. I enjoy word games, but I feel like they need a speed and/or simultaneous play element to be fun, especially with more than 2 players. Boggle and Bananagrams are both great in this regard, but Word on the Street is different enough from either of those that I don't mind owning it as well.

The board is a street with most of the letters of the alphabet (sans vowels and X/J/Z) represented as tiles. Players/teams take 30-second turns drawing a category card ("Things that you push", "Makes/models of cars", etc.), spelling a word that fits the category, and pulling the letters still on the board that are contained in that word towards them. If a letter is moved three spaces towards one team or the other, it is pulled off the board and that team claims it. First team to claim 8 letters (of 17) wins.

Unfortunately, the sand timer included in the game either came broken or broke the first time I flipped it over, but our kitchen timer was quickly drafted as a replacement. With 2 players, the game was quite a bit quieter and more thoughtful than I imagine it would be with more, but I feel like it will work either way (in fact at the last Just Awesome adult game night there had been a group of 10-12 playing it very loudly and having a great time). The game takes maybe 15 minutes, and Hilary liked it so much that she wanted to play it again immediately.

Cardcassonne

Chris 437, Hilary 378
This one we actually played with Erik (one of the Just Awesome owners) at their previous adult game night, and Hilary won it, so she was already predisposed to like it (and in fact it had been her suggestion to get it when we went on our mini shopping spree). It's a set-collection game where you are often playing things that other people are going to end with, so you need to be circumspect about what you play when.

With 3 I thought it was interesting, and I think I'll like it with 4-5 as well, but with 2 I found it just a little static and flat, which is too bad because I was hopeful it would work well. I'll try to play it a couple more times with more players, but I already begin suspect that Ra does everything Cardcassonne does but better (which is no slight on Cardcassonne as Ra is one of my favorites). Also the scores with 2 are kind of stupid-high, and for some reason I find that aesthetically off-putting. Must be why I like baseball and soccer too.

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