Gaming in May

May was a bit of a down month (as was April, at least compared to the first quarter of 2010) as far as my gaming was concerned. The month featured a couple of big gatherings for party games, one at my brother-in-law's place in Vermont, and the other here at the Todd Residence. The former consisted of a big game of Time's Up won by the Mrs. and Emily, a couple of games of Ca$h'N Gun$ (the Mrs. and Mike the two winners), and a three player session of Ghost Stories in which Tom, Emily, and I emerged victorious (despite playing on Nightmare difficulty) The latter game night featured a nine player game of Pit (which I didn't realize until mid-game is actually only an eight-player game), and another session of Time's Up, this time with three teams of three. I liked the 3x3 configuration for this one, and amazingly enough the game ended in a three way tie at 40 points each!

The Mrs. and I had another couple over with their son to play games. After one big game of Dixit, the grown-ups attempted a play of Ghost Stories, but we had to cut it short due to lateness of hour.

The Mrs. and I played a couple of games while we were visiting my Mom's and we couldn't manage to recruit my sometimes lame gaming family to play anything. One was Ghost Stories on Nightmare which we lost in epic fashion, and my latest expansion for Carcassonne (Abbey & Mayor...thanks darling!), which the Mrs. won by a landslide.

I did manage to keep up a weekly online game throughout the month, so that is a big positive. At various times myself, Tom, Ben, Trevor, and Toph all participated. Most frequent game played in May was Puerto Rico, which I'm really loving despite really not being very good at it at all, followed by Pandemic. Everyone seems to be enjoying both games and I look forward to delving further into those two and adding to the variety as we continue our weekly meetup.

My final bit of gaming in May is my return to Magic: the Gathering. I played a fair amount about a year ago when Shards of Alara, Conflux, and Alara Reborn were the newest sets, and I built a couple of decks. Now I have the full Zendikar block to play with and there seems to be some pretty fun stuff in there.

I haven't had much of an opportunity to play yet, mostly I've been tossing around ideas and trying to come up with a fun standard deck to play, and I've been trying to sell off the more valuable of my standard legal cards before they rotate out and lose value. Really one of the tricks to maintaining the value of one's collection in Magic is to try to sell or trade cards while they still hold strong value, and acquire others that are either older and are poised to better maintain price, or are brand new and will be tournament legal for another year or two. I have certainly sold some cards I would rather keep this time around, but I can always reacquire them a year down the road once they're a lot cheaper.

Besides building a new deck for standard tournament play I've been working on two EDH (Elder Dragon Highlander) decks. This is a format that I love (from very limited play, of course, but I love the idea!), and it tends to be a very inexpensive format to play. Because of this I'm able to maximize the play value of my limited card pool and can convert a few expensive cards into a decent stack of EDH staples.

Looking forward to June, I intend to play a bunch of magic, continue my weekly online board game night, and get to playing a whole lot more strategy board games! Also, perhaps I'll write a little more often in this ol' blog. My fan is demanding higher output, so I'll try to write just a little bit more than I have these last couple of months...

When the Mrs. Goes Away: RftG, Party Games, BSW

Race for the Galaxy (Thursday)

I taught David the game on Thursday, and it occurred to me that I'm really not very good at game explanation! I felt like I chose a very poor route to describing the game and realize now that I need to start coming up with a game plan before teaching any game. Luckily, David knows his board games and was able to stumble through the weak explanation and manage to learn the game well enough to beat me despite this being perhaps my 7th or 8th play to his 1st...

This experience also makes me wonder if I may let my guard down when teaching games. David also beat me in our first game of Agricola, though I suppose that was his second game overall, just his first in a year or two.

Race for the Galaxy is a space themed card game that uses similar mechanics to the legendary Puerto Rico board game--namely, that each player chooses a particular role at the start of the turn to determine which actual game phases occur that turn. For instance, if no one chooses the 'Settle' card, then the Settle phase doesn't happen this turn, and no one will have the chance to settle a new world.

Race involves lots of strategy, but is fairly quick playing. The cards are marked with a system of icons that take a little time getting used to, and the game explanation is a bit lengthy, but thus far I've been very impressed with the game and would love to start playing it more often.

Party Games (Friday)

We had a five person group over for more light-hearted games on Friday night. The glaring omission here would be Time's Up, which we still haven't managed to get to the table in 2010, though we love it so! The fact we had an odd number of players dissuaded us here, though there is a five player variant in the rules that we will have to try sometime.

• Ca$h'N Gun$ People do seem to enjoy this one, though we have still only played with the basic rules which really do not interest me very much. Certainly next time we play we'll have to move up to one of the more advanced variants, either the one with the specialized player powers or the 'one of us is a cop' version.
• Dixit I have enjoyed this game every time I've played it, but I'm still not fully sold. Dixit is creative, which I like, but it seems a little too subdued to be considered a party game. Not sure what niche it will ultimately fill, but I hope it does find a place because there is some potential here. Currently, however, I would reach for Time's Up, Say Anything, or Wits & Wagers before Dixit.
• Dancing Eggs The kids' game that works better for grown ups made an appearance at the end of the night because it is just so simple to explain and quick to play. I even won this one because Sarah wasn't present and she always wins! The game is fun enough that I won't turn it down when people want to play it, but I certainly wouldn't suggest it myself...

Carcassonne (on BrettSpielWelt, Tuesday)

I've been playing a lot of Carcassonne lately, both in person with Abby and online with the likes of Ben, Trevor, and Tom. This session was with Ben and we played two games, each of us winning one of them. I really like the idea of playing this one online, but unfortunately it is hampered by the inability of players to look at their next tile during the downtime when other players are taking their turns. In face to face Carc this really helps the game move along at a brisk pace since you can plan most of your strategy between turns.

Pandemic (on BrettSpielWelt, Wednesday)

We've hit a bit of a rough patch with Pandemic as of late, probably because we haven't been playing it much recently. This time we played on Legendary difficulty (7 epidemics), players were Tom (Dispatcher), Trevor (Containment Specialist), and myself (Researcher). We were doing a pretty good job at keeping the diseases down, I dished cards to others to get the cures and we were able to construct several research stations. In the end we were two turns from victory when back to back epidemics hit and the second one landed in a city with a cube already in it next to a 3-cube city. Red ended with -15 cubes and we had probably 15 outbreaks as well...

Well, that just about does it for my week of gaming: 7 straight days of board games that helped me pass the time until my love returned from Las Vegas. Not mentioned were a number of games I played with the kids including Yahtzee, Heroscape, and Carcassonne: the Castle, all of which we enjoyed immensely. Here's to many more games in 2010!