Turkey Day Family Game Night

After much Thanksgiving Day overeating, we sat down for a special edition of Family Game Night. I decided to try out Piratenbucht on the kids and Lisa. At 10, Sophie matches the minimum age listed on the box. At 8, I thought Noah might have a few problems here and there but he kept up pretty darn well. In the end, Sophie won, if you can believe it. I’ve never seen anyone throw dice like that. I could not protect my ship in any way shape or form against her onslaughts. When I wasn’t battling Sophie, I kept finding myself battling with Lisa. Noah and Sophie kept racking up tons of cash.

November Game Night – 2004

Rich was kind enough to host a special November edition of game night to take the place of both a cancelled earlier November Game Night of the same name as well as the cancelled December Game Night of a different name. Thanks Rich! Okay enough about Rich, although he [kind of] won El Grande he’s still was sleeping…

We had a new player tonight, Darren Thompson, a co-worker of my wife at the School For Young Children. He seemed to be willing to put up with our quipping and heckling about his silly plays in the game. However, he just didn’t seem to understand the basic game rule that if you can’t advance your own position, then you attack Ken’s position.

Unfortunately, due to Darren’s lack of zeal in this area, Ken and Rich tied for second in El Grande. Due to the rules of El Grande, a tie means that nobody gets the benefits awarded to the tied position and everybody moves down one. I held the 3rd position solidly with Keith and Darren in 4th and 5th places.

We only played the short form of El Grande. Although Keith and I tried to make the short form feel like the long form by maximizing turn angst and even with some quality OCD-like behavior from our esteemed green cube arranger using the code named Ken, our game did end pretty quickly and we were also able to get in 3 rounds of 6-Nimmt.In English, 6-Nimmt translates to “I am screwed because Ken creates huge gaps between numbers”.

We hope to have Darren back again but from the pictures you can see that he’s aspiring to “be like” [sleepy] Rich. If he keeps that behavior up we’ll have to crank the ridicule level up a few notches.