Klunker

Yea, I finally got to play this game. It had been out on the table for a while now. It is a light filler game of set collecting. However, if you have more than one set at a time when you are collecting, you receive less money. You also put cards in your store front in order to tempt someone to buy it and give you a dollar. The person with the most money when the game ends will win.

It is a simple enough game and I was lucky enough to be able to collect sets without any contamination.

Tempus

Another playing of Tempus and I am starting to suspect that there are a couple of things that unbalance this game. The first is the Religion card. This card allows you to convert one enemy token to one of yours. It is unbalanced because you spend one action to have babies and (usually) one action to move that token. Now, on some other person’s turn, they play the Religion card which does not cost them an action. This essentially gives them a free baby and movement where you lost two actions. You can then be attacked now that you are unexpectedly weakened. Not fun.

The second problem is the turtle strategy. If you have three stacks or less, you cannot be attacked (however, you can do the attacking). Someone who uses this wisely, will build up many cities and then turtle down to three stacks. This will make them invulernable. Fortunately, having 3 or less stacks usually makes you weaker in the game. It was discussed on the geek here.

Tichu

Our team was having all the luck. Although I did learn thing. If your partner passes you the Mahjong, then they usually want you to play it singly and to wish for the (usually) low card that you pass the person on your left. Jon passed me the Mahjong and I used it to increase my straight (from 2-6 to 1-6). Unfortunately, Jon did not get a chance to take the lead even though he had a Tichu hand. Next time…

I was able to finally record a full game! But it was not without problems. In trying to recover from missing pictures, I felt like a CSI detective. For example,

I did not take a picture of when John played a pair of sixes. Fortunately, my hand was visible in some of those pictures. And, since I was the last player out, I was able to figure out that John played the red six and the green six.

Jon plays a straight incorrectly. Usually we (Adam) catch this, but not this time. I notice that I can only account for 13 of Jon’s 14 cards that he played.

However, when Adam was the last player out, he showed his hand to us when I was taking the picture. And I was able to figure out that the missing card was the black six. That card should have been in the straight but Jon must have played it later.