All the Games on Our Shelves

 I've been waiting for a game night with friends to pull out Balderdash -- much more fun with more people -- too easy with just four of us!  Last night we had a total of 8 people here; there weren't enough of the pawns that came with the game, so we grabbed other little figures, a hippo, a frog, a warrior, etc.  I've labeled this as a "Word Game," and it is a game of making up definitions, but it is also a game of coming up with descriptions of movies based on title, short bios of people based only on the name, etc.  The full list of categories is under the picture of the game-board below. There is a box of cards that lists one each of the 5 categories in the game.  Players take turns being the card reader; the rest of the players make up definitions or descriptions and then pass those to the reader.  When all definitions or descriptions are read out, all players select the one that sounds correct to them.  Points are awarded based on how many votes your &quo

Last night was game night at our house, and our friends the Gerdes family came for dinner and gaming (and brought WONDERFUL dessert, but more on that later).  We only had time to play three games - some of us busy working too late and getting up too early to push it beyond that, but the games we got in were good.  The first game we played is one I've posted about already: Spyfall .  The second was Balderdash , which will be the topic of my next post, game 34.  The third and final game was the Picture Sentence Game , which I haven't posted about yet, but isn't technically "on" our shelf either since it's a party game played with pencil and paper.  Hmm  .  .  . A little sample of the Picture Sentence Game is above.  It's like the whispering "telephone" game that little kids play. In this game, one person writes a sentence, the next draws a picture of that sentence, the next writes a sentence describing the picture, and so on.  You can see how

 This is labeled a "Bonus Game" since it is not a game from our shelves.  This one belongs to my brother.  Caleb had played it with him and liked it so much that he wanted to introduce it to us as well, so it's on loan from Tim.  It seems like a really fun game, and I'm eager to play it again.  This afternoon was not a good time for me to get introduced to a new game.  We had guests coming over tonight - for, um, gaming - and there was yet food prep to do and cleaning to take care of.  The winner is the player who flips over (i.e. buys or develops) the four cards they are given at the beginning of the game: Train Station, Shopping Mall, Amusement Park, and Radio Tower.  You buy other cards along the way to help you build up monetary resources.  These cards allow you to get money in various ways - on your turn, on another's turn, from another player, etc. - based on the roll of one or two 6-sided dice.  It gets pretty fun as you get rolling (ha ha) because the

 Tales of the Arabian Nights: The Legendary Storytelling Boardgame in the World of Aladdin and Sinbad .  How's THAT for a title?!  Since David, who is not a fan of this game, was gone tonight, I suggested to Caleb and Jacob that we play it - which was a good idea.  I also suggested that we play outside - which wasn't such a good idea.  Even though it is the third longest day of the year, the sunlight didn't quite hold out for us and reading got a bit hard at the end, and there is a lot of reading in this story-based game.  As you go through the game encounter many things, such as serpents, elephants, princesses, magicians, sages, beggars, beasts, storms, whirlpools, maidens, rocs, and more!  At each encounter you decide how to act in your encounter - whether to attack, aid, honor, abduct, bargain, hire, trick, grovel, avoid, pray, etc., etc., etc.  Based on your decision, the reader of the Reaction Matrices tells the reader of the Book of Tales which paragraph to

 Dominion remains one of my favorite games, but my sons aren't such fans anymore.  I'm not sure if we played it too much when it first came out or if we got stuck in ruts with our strategies.  One son said to me last night that he didn't like how other people's choices overly impacted his choice for how to play.  (It also perhaps doesn't help that one son has too good a mind for strategy with this game and can demolish the rest of us but takes his own sweet time in doing so  .  .  .  that may just be part of the issue.)  I chose to play this game last night because we were getting together with friends, and I thought that playing with people we don't normally play this game with would mix things up a bit.  I'm not sure I got any good experimental evidence on that, as I set up the game very quickly and am not sure I selected a good variety of cards.  I hope somebody will play this with me more in the future because I do enjoy it tremendously, and I'm ho

GAME NIGHT!!  You know life is too busy when it takes months to set up a game night with good gamer friends!  The stars finally aligned last night, and we were able to play with Anna and Tyler.  Something else that is self-evident is that your friends really know about gaming if they are choosing those that have won the Spiel des Jahres award!  This stamp of high approval is on the game Kingdomino.  This is a game they introduced us to last night, and it is definitely a game I want to play a lot more of!  The goal, as with so many games, is to get the most points.  You do so by building a 5x5 size kingdom out of "dominoes" (i.e. land tiles of size 1x2).  These consist of squares of different terrains, some of which have one or more crown symbols on them.  When counting points at the end, only the terrains that contain one or more crowns count.  You multiply the number of orthogonally-conntected tiles of a given terrain, and multiply the number of those tiles by the numbe