All the Games on Our Shelves

  Anthony brought this game with him when he and his family headed up north to our place for Christmas break.  We enjoyed it so much that David promptly ordered one for us.  The package arrived today, and we just finished playing our first game together.  It's a good combination of strategy and luck, though somewhat heavier on strategy, I'd say.  We are pleased with the quality of it - the feel and look of the tiles and gems, the solid box that folds over and closes magnetically, etc.  Unfortunately, ours arrived with one side of the box torn in two places.  I'm not sure how that could have happened, as it was well-packed and was sealed in it's original plastic wrapper.  We thought about returning it, but we'd enjoyed it so much that we didn't have the patience to send it back and wait for another one, so we're just taping up the tears.  Here are the opening few moves to our first game. You begin with 5 tiles, and you draw-up again after your...

  I can't believe I hadn't yet posted on this common classic, Sequence .  Caleb requested to play this today, after I had suggested Dominion and Splendor .  He wasn't in the mood for that sort of game (unusual!) and went upstairs to look at the shelves.  He saw this and said he remembered it being one of his favorite games in childhood.  So we played.  We used to play it quite a bit -- decades ago!  It's not one I've been drawn to because it's so simple and doesn't involve a lot of strategy, but I was pleasantly surprised at how engaging I found it to be today.   The game consists of a board with a grid of card images on it, and you begin with 7 cards in your hand.  You can play a token of your color on a spot on the board that matches your card.  (There are more than one of each.)  The goal is to be the first to get two sequences, a sequence being five in a row.  There are no jacks on the board, as they have special abil...

  Well, we continue to play games I've already "counted" and games that aren't on OUR shelves, so the count remains on hold.  David and I played a new game tonight, a game that my brother left here for us to try.  I'd been grading midterms all week, so it took us a while to get to this.  It was a nice way to end the week - very fun game - also very pretty, which is always nice.  We played two rounds.  David won the first, and I won the second.  I can see that the more we play this game the more it is going to change on us as we guard against each other and try to out-strategize each other.  One issue to work out is whether to try to play as many cards as possible as fast as possible or to try to get things set up so as to be able to play higher point cards, but always with the fear that the other person will mess up the grid if you try to do this over a couple of turns.  Each card has a point value.  You get to play the card if the pictu...

This post contains photos of the games we played during our family time over the Christmas holiday - other than the games that I've posted about individually already.  There are ten games listed here - if I count our jigsaw puzzle as a game: Tetris, Charty Party, Saboteur, Magic the Gathering, Jigsaw Puzzle, Avalon, Decktective: The Gaze of the Ghost, Sagrada (with new expansion), Just One, and Concept.  I love the variety of types of games that we enjoy together.  This post will be mostly pictures with a little bit of text.  The first game, Tetris, was a Christmas gift to Brianna from Caleb.  It was found to be highly enjoyable but with just a little wrinkle in that it's hard to see the colored marks needed for scoring on the frames after the pieces have been placed.  The second game is Charty Party , which Caleb brought over from Tim's house.  It's a lot like Apples to Apples , and it generated a lot of laughter. Game three, Saboteur , is an oldie bu...