Author: matt

Wizard

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.

Blokus

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.

Geeky Justice -or- All that glitters is not Geek Gold

Okay, I admit it, I’m a boardgame geek and I spend way too much time reading about games on BoardGameGeek.com (BGG). As a card carrying member of BGG for several years now (I registered in December of 2002), I’m slowly amassing what’s called Geek Gold. Now Geek Gold is really kinda silly but for contributing content to the site, you get this stuff and you can then use the stuff to pay for things like a personal avatar image (mine is the Carcassonne tile on the right), a geek badge, an uber-geek badge, games in the auction area etc.

After implementing an electronic version of Leo Colovini’s Clans game I had found a BGG Geeklist enumerating free online games that have computer opponents. I wanted to add my game to the list but I hadn’t uploaded a screenshot of my game to the Clans game. So this last weekend I did that and waited for the image to be approved. Today, I got the email that it had been rejected due to it being too similar to other images for Clans. I was shocked! How could the image of my game be too much like other images for Clans?

So I jumped out to BGG and looked up Clans and found this image had already been uploaded. I had missed my opportunity to get Geek Gold for my own game since ‘chaosbreaker’ had already uploaded a screenshot.

The funniest thing about the whole thing is that chaosbreaker was the author of the geeklist I was trying to add my game to in the first place.

Family Game Night

Since Sophie wanted to play the 2-person Alhambra, Noah decided he wanted to play Rumis with mom. So Lisa and Noah played in the family room while Sophie and I played at the kitchen table. I wasn’t expecting much but I am surprised at how much I like Alhambra as a 2-person game. The game moves a lot faster and it feels like you’re really in control of your destiny. Neither of us bought any buildings for the phantom player but he did have some pretty lucky draws for Garden, Tower, and Chambers that I was fighting against.

Coloretto

We finally got a chance to play one of my new games this evening. We ran out of time to play a few learning rounds of Memoir ’44 so we broke out Coloretto. I had read through the rules once before hand and we were able to get up and running in about 5 minutes. The game plays very quickly and is extremely light; about in the same league as 6-Nimmt. There are 9 chameleons in 7 colors, some +2 cards and 3 wild cards. Each player starts with a card of a different color face up in their play area. You never hold cards in your hand.

In the middle of the table is the draw pile and a row of ‘row indicator’ cards (the same number of cards as players). Each turn a player either draws and lays the card in a row (max 3 cards in the row) or takes all the cards in a row (min 1 card) along with the row indicator card (and sits out the rest of the round). The round progresses until all rows have been taken by the remaining players.

The 16th from the last card in the deck is always the ‘end of round’ card (a special card with an arrow on it) and when the last row is taken after this card is drawn, the game ends.

At game end you, assign wilds cards to your one or more of your top three colors, compare the number of your top three colors of matching chameleons against the ‘point chart’ (plus any +2 cards) to arrive at your score. You then take the non-highest colored chameleons and substract the points shown by the point chart to then arrive at your final score. The player with the most points after four games is the winner. Ties remain just that…ties.

We liked the game but I suspect it will only see the table during road trips and things like that but it does provide some semi-mindless fun.

Memoirs of a Gamer

I got my new game fix again on Friday. Rich was putting in an order and I dropped in a few more titles. I normally order from Game Surplus but Thought Hammer offers free shipping on orders over $100 so we went with them. I’ll still go back to Game Surplus for orders less than $100 but I was satisfied with the price and service of Thought Hammer.

I ordered Memoir ’44 to provide a heavier weight 2-person game. The game plays like a light game but my hope is that it feels heavier than most 2-player games like Balloon Cup, Battle Line, etc. My covert reason (although not now) is that it might entice my game group to feel better about breaking into two tables and to reduce the “I’m sitting at the kiddie table” feeling.

I bought Coloretto and Tichu as filler/closer games that will also be nice to take on trips. Both games are easy to learn with the added benefit of appealing to more non-gamer types since they are more familiar with card-based ‘family’ games. Tichu also supports up to 10 players so it will scale well when you get done playing a round and the additional cousin or in-law is wanting to jump in.

If you have any thoughts or words of wisdom about my purchases, feel free to comment.