I had few friends over the other night for games. Since I foolishly forgot to take photos while we played, I will have to steal some box cover photos from BGG to go along with this post.
Cathedral - Family Games, Inc. edition
Cathedral – this quick abstract is one of the first games I picked up after getting into the hobby. It’s beautiful, fast and fun; normally I don’t like abstracts but these qualities appeal to me. I played two games with Ben: I won the first, and he the second.
Quoridor - Gigamic edition
Quoridor – another lovely wooden abstract. Quoridor can be hilariously frustrating, as the game consists of the opponents toying with each other while trying to race to the other side. You don’t want to travel too far forward, as your opponent will block you. And you don’t want to leave one difficult path across the board, as you will have to travel along it as well. It is pretty enjoyable to try and dupe your opponent to wasting moves by traveling in a specific direction, only to be blocked at the end of their path. Ben and I played three games of this; I won the first two and he the last.
Entdecker - Goldsieber edition
Entdecker – at this point our other friend Ben showed up, and we dug into Entdecker. This game is an enjoyable light game of exploration, tile-placement and area majority. I used some variant rules gleaned from Mark Johnsons’s thread on BGG. These added an extra element of strategy that was quite enjoyable for me. Ben II and I tied for the win. I’m glad to have finally tried this old Klaus Teuber game. I look forward to filming a stop-motion recording of us playing a game, as I think it would be really cool to see the map fill with islands so quickly.
High Society - Gryphon Games edition
High Society – during Entdecker my friend Laura came by to borrow some games. After finishing, Ben I left, and Laura sat down to play High Society with me and Ben II. I had never played before and quite enjoyed it, although I think this game would really shine with four or five players. It is a pretty simple auction game where you are bidding on items that score you points. Most items are worth positive points, one is worth negative points, some are score multipliers, one halves your score, and one makes you discard a card. For the good items, the last person left in the bidding pays the money and takes the item. For the bad items, the first person to pass takes the item for free, and all players left pay in their money. At the end of the game, the person with the least money left over is automatically eliminated! I think this element takes it from a decent game to a good one, as the fact that you don’t want to spend too much hangs over your head for the entire game. Pretty neat! Laura kicked our butts in this game. I was eliminated for having the least money.
Sushizock im Gockelwok - Zoch edition
Sushizock im Gockelwok – our final game was a quick round of Sushizock. I love this push-your-luck dice game even more than Pickomino. I purchased this game in early February of 2009 and have already played over 20 times. Too bad it has not been released in the states…
The basics are that you roll dice and try to acquire good pieces of sushi worth high values, and bad pieces of sushi worth low values. At the end of the game, you cannot score good sushi tiles that do not have a matching piece of bad sushi. There is a lot of stealing from each other, a fair amount of fun gambling on results, and quite a bit of yelling and cursing (at least when we play)! I think Ben won by a point.
Thanks to Ben, Ben and Laura for coming by to hang out and play games!
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