My wife has been recuperating from some medical issues recently but she’s been well enough and getting better every day to want to play games most every night. I thought I’d spend a few minutes annotating a few photos I’ve taken over the last week or so. Enjoy.
Lisa and I like Oregon but like many games, it’s been awhile since it’s seen the table. It’s easy and quick to play. Sometimes you feel forced to make the best of bad cards but it has proven to be a good activity for us to spend some time together without too much heavy lifting.
She mentioned Stone Age so we dusted it off and gave it a go. In the past, we’d played the heck out of it the first few months we had it but it has been a long time since it’s seen the table. It does play a bit mechanically once you get the hang of it but we were both glad to have let it out to see the light of day again.
Next up we played three or four games of Kingdom Builder. We even played one game with the same set of boards and only shuffled the cards to see how differently it played. Lisa won the first game handily and I felt trapped in a corner. The second game I won by a decent margin so, at least in that board set up, the cards can make a huge difference. There’s not much heavy lifting in Kingdom Builder but Lisa really likes it for a nice activity to pass the time on a lazy evening.
When Lisa felt up to learning a brand new game, I pulled out Hawaii intending only to introduce her to the game but with only two, we quickly finished and she said she liked it but could see that it would be completely different with more players. With two, it’s relatively easy to purchase the stuff you want but with more players, the goods are scarce! Cool “feet-ples”.
I pulled out Terra Nova, a game I got for free a couple of years ago but had never played, and after only a few moves, Lisa was ready to pack it up. She’s not one to like abstract thinky games. Players start with all their “guys” on the board and then move them around reminiscent of the Hey! That’s My Fish! mechanic but instead of pulling tiles up you wall off territory and in an area majority game mechanic earn points. She really didn’t like it and felt that every move she made would make her feel silly when the next player (me!) took advantage of a weakness of position. Too “chessy” she called it.
Lisa has always like Lost Cities and the few times we’ve played the board game version she’s always had fun. We’d never played it with just the two of us but we gave it a shot and it was an enjoyable activity for the night. I like it better with more players but the mechanics work well and it’s light enough we could talk about other things while we played and grumbled about not getting the cards we needed 🙂
Tonight we pulled out Rattus with the Pied Piper expansion. Rattus works much better with more players and we played with the incorrect rules for the Soldier making the Nun card too powerful. Lisa took great advantage of that but could feel that something was amiss. Still, we had a good time. Lisa was ready to play another game back to back so it’s a winner and a keeper.