For Sale

We started out with the short game For Sale. This was the first time that I played it (which is sad since I have owned it for a while now) and I liked it. The quality of the game is nice. The artwork is pretty and the card quality is solid.

The first half of the game plays like a game of chicken. Players can either take the worst building or offer money not to take a building yet. If a player takes the worst building, then they give half of their money that they offered to the bank. The last player left gives all of the offered money to the bank and takes the last card. Any remaining money will contribute to your score. In the second half of the game, players compete for checks which are the other part of their final score. This part of the game involves blind bidding where players select a building from their hand and reveal them simultaneously. The person with the highest building takes the most expensive check.

Strand-Cup

We decided to play another quick game since some other people might show up soon. I suggested a speed game of Strand-Cup. This is a good game and it fits its theme well. As long as people do not agonize and play the game like they would a volleyball game, you will have a fun time. Doug and I felt the pain of not having a well rounded hand of cards. However, the game can accomidate that by allowing you to discard a card during the serve and rolling a dice instead, or having another team mate volley the ball.

There is a randomness to the game with the dice, but it is offset by the number of points that is needed to win the game. However, Doug was having bad luck during the game. He rolled 1-1, 2-2, and 1-2 when he was trying to volley the ball. He should not have been on the sand that day!

Attika

In this game, I was the start player. I only had two types of cards and I did not have my city out, so I decided to draw counters and put them on my mat (and fortunately, I drew my city). On my next turn, I put my city close to Jeff. On Jeff’s turn, he decided to hose me and put 3 roads around my city. After that I was out of the running to win the game. Had Jeff played better he could have won the game. Instead, Doug won it.

Euphrat & Tigris

I suggested that we play this game. This is another game that I wish we would play more of. During the game, I did not have the right mixture of tiles when I wanted to go on the offensive and attack. Consequently, I didn’t do much during the game and lost. We had new players in the game and I was surprised that it was a quick game.

Goa

Tonight, the only game that I played was Goa. The russcon group has been infatuated with word games recently. And tonight was no exception. Almost everyone wanted to play Letras. I decided to sit it out and wait for more people to show up. When another person showed up, I suggested Goa.

Another problem with russcon folks is that they take longer to play games. Goa says on the box that it is a 90 minute game and we took 3 hours to play the game. Some of the reasons for that is people get up to talk to other people, or to get food, or to talk on the phone. But that doesn’t account for that much of the wait. This group just operates on a different timescale.

It is a shame that Goa is not played that often. We seem to play it once a year. Because it has been so long since I last played it, I did not remember any old strategy or things to look out for.

Manifest Destiny

Today, I played Manifest Destiny as my only game. This is a somewhat complex game and we were asked to read the rules before playing. Unfortunately, I did not have enough time to do that, but, during the drive to Ed’s house, Adam explained the rules to me (well, as much as you can with no visuals). We started around 6:30pm and ended at 10:30pm which made it a long game. The map is centered on the United States and includes Canada, Mexico, and small boxes representing other areas like the Middle East. There are three eras during the game (the last being our century). Your goal is to expand an empire, but I did not really feel like I was playing a civilization game. There is a lot of randomness to this game in determining the success of attacking, defending, and researching technology (which gives you special powers). The bias is towards attacking, so your are constantly growing and shrinking in your area. Your strategy is determined by what action cards that you draw. These cards are mostly malicious so expect a lot of swings in who the leader is at any one point in time.

I was surprised that I won this game. After all, I was playing with Marty and Adam. Both of who have played this game before. I think that I won because no one picked on me during the game. Adam and Jon were both leaders at one point and then heavily mangled by other players. For example, Jon was decimated in one area by one action card.

Sadly, as elated as I was when I won the game. It quickly turned to shame when I accidentally spilled my beer on Adam’s game!

Clocktowers

This is a light filler game. I am glad that we finally played this, since I own it. I bought it because it is an Alan Moon game that I thought was Capitol-lite. For my first playing of this, I really didn’t feel the Capitolness. However, perhaps more playings of this will coax out that Capitol feeling that I was looking for. On its own, its a quick game with not much player interaction besides the usual moaning and groaning about your poor cards.

Ice Cream

This is another light filler game. The theme is about ice cream and it seems to fill it well. It bears some resemblence to Coloretto. It is playable by both kids and adults. You need to keep in mind how to set yourself up for the next round of play as you hose your opponents.

Ticket To Ride Europe

This is the next game in the Ticket to Ride series. Since the original game was so popular, it is no surprise that a franchise has been created. I like this game better than its predecessor. It has a mechanism that helps you out when your route is blocked. And it introduces new features to the game such as tunnels and ferries. In this game, I was having some bad luck trying to draw colors that I needed. When the game ended, I had many cards left over and only played about half of them. Consequently, I lost because I wasted so many turns trying to draw needed cards. This game still has some of the aspects of the original game that I did not like. They are: initial route cards may not be close to one another, and other people will cut you off in the route you are going for.

M

This is still an interesting game, although I had bad luck in it. The key to winning is controlling when a “scoring” occurs. If you can do it, then you can pick up a tile that helps you and hurts others. The other part to the game is trying to match up to other tiles so you can take points from the player to your right.