BONUS: Game Night at the Kirk House

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 number of crowns in that terrain.  There's a very interesting dynamic relating to the order in which players get to choose terrain tiles on each turn.
 We played quite a variety of games last night.  Can't Stop is a dice game in which you have to do a lot of risk management.  Do you push your luck and perhaps lose all the progress you made on that turn, or do you play it safe and try to get three of your pawns to the top first fast?  You are "on" three numbers each time, and if your roll of 4 dice does not result in any pairs that give one of your three numbers, you lose all your progress for that turn.  Once a player makes it to the top of a column, that number is blocked out.  Once someone makes it to the top of 3 columns, the game is over, and that person wins.

 Next up was Jamaica (which is nothing like Puerto Rico!).  Each of these three games was introduced to us last night, and each one was a hit!!  They were all very different, yet all awesome!  I marvel at how creative people are in developing new games!
 Below is a photo of the game with our hosts Anna and Tyler (and new baby Emmry).  If you take a look at the ships on the game board you'll notice that the yellow one (mine) is way behind, and I stayed consistent that way until the end of the game, but I still had a great time.  I'd really like to play this one again.  All three of these games are going on my birthday list for this year for sure.
 We brought one game from our shelves, Dominion.  This one too is a Spiel des Jahres winner.  As a family we used to play this game incessantly, but my boys have gotten rather sick of it.  I brought it last night because I love it, and I thought that playing with a different set of folks might shake up some of our strategy ruts.
 Because this game is one of the games "on our shelves" this one will get its own post tomorrow as Game 32.

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