It got a little late to teach the kids Tigris and Euphrates so we decided to play Himalaya with the downloadable d20 replacement cards.
The replacement cards remove the randomness of restocking goods and orders in the villages allowing you to predict where they’ll show up. I didn’t, however, find myself anticipating plunder in particular villages even though some card counted would have given me some future insight. I chalk it up to not fully engaging all of my mental capacities since I was playing with my kids. For those who game with me you know that that’s a crock of heaping crapola but this is my blog not yours.
We hadn’t unpacked the d20 but we ended up getting it out of the box and we used it to indicate the starting player for each round. After the first few rounds we ran out of cards (you use half of them just to setup the board) and I chose to shuffle the discards which took us through the rest of the game. When using the d20, if you roll the number of a village that is already occupied by goods or an order, you’re supposed to just increment the value until you get to an empty village. After the reshuffle, this situation arose for us as well and we chose to just flip up subsequent cards until we exposed an empty village. I hope that’s how you’re supposed to handle that situation but since I can’t read the French on Tilsit’s web site I’m not sure.
Noah has always been a meeple-arranger and tonight was no exception.
