Month: September 2005

We played Bohnanza this evening and Lisa laid down the largest set of stink west of the Pecos. She surged into a huge lead and never looked back. I came in dead last with Sophie 2nd and Noah 3rd. I could not for the life of me get a trade in edgewise and I kept having to harvest a small field for no gold due to my inability to trade and or draw anything of value.

This time however, we played with the correct rules where you cannot harvest a field with only a single bean in it if you have another field that has more than one bean. We also threw out the coffee beans this time since we were only playing with four. Ah… a much better game even though it made Lisa a real stinker.

We played Wizard tonight and Sophie crushed us all with some non-conventional play. If I would even attempt to play that way, I would have lost horribly. On second thought, the way I did play I lost horribly anyway.

Wizard is a trick taking game consisting of a standard deck of 52 cards plus 4 Wizards and 4 Jesters. The first hand only one card is dealt to each player, the second two, the third three, etc. After cards are dealt, another card is turned up and that suit becomes trump. Players are then polled for the number of tricks they will take in the hand. It’s extremely important to hit your bid exactly. Like Euchre, you must follow the lead suit if you have it or you can trump. However you can, at any time play a Jester (never takes a trick) or a Wizard (always trumps everything).

After all tricks in the hand are taken, you get 20 points for hitting your bid exactly plus 10 points per trick –or– you get -10 points for each trick (plus or minus) from your bid. The number of rounds changes according to the number of players since each round the number of cards in your hand increases.

Wizard is a nice family game. It’s very easy to learn and readily available.

Noah didn’t really want to play but we kind of coaxed him. He really just wanted to read that book sitting on the table; a book of lateral thinking puzzles.

Sophie has been wanting to take a walk in the neighborhood after dark….well…just because I think. So while we were waiting for it to get dark I pulled out Blokus for a quick 3-person game with the kids. I don’t really think they were into it since they didn’t appear to be planning ahead. You’ll go nowhere but in the losing bracket with Blokus if you just grab the first piece that strikes your fancy and look for a place to put it. Oh well, it passed the time and they seemed to enjoy it.