Game 21: For Sale

For Sale is a simple, fast, basic game that nonetheless is able to hold our interest.  There are two main rounds, one in which you buy property and one in which you sell property.  The property cards are ordered in terms of value from 1 through 30, and in each round as many property cards are set out as there are players.  Players use money to bid on the properties.  In the second round dollar amounts are set out from $0 to $15,000 - here too it's as many cards as there are players - and players play one of their properties face down.  The highest-numbered property gets the highest dollar value (like bidding or an auction) and on down to the lowest-numbered property getting the lowest dollar value. 
 The picture below is of the first round, the bidding phase, property "values" here range from 5 to 29.  The first person to drop out of the bidding gets the lowest property "value."  As people drop out they pay half the coins they have bid (rounded up).  The last person out gets the highest "valued" property, but they have to pay all the coins they bid to the bank.  We hide the number of coins we have left (hence the box lid in front of me) so that players don't know what it will take to outbid other players.
 Below is a sample of a few of the cards.  Properties range from a dilapidated cardboard box to an igloo to a cabin to a castle to the space station - and everything in between!  As well as a house, each card has an animal on it, which is kind of neat.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

BONUS: Special Events - CMC^3 and Thanksgiving

Image
These days it is me, David, and Jacob in the area, but it is rare that I get a photo of all three of us, as one of us generally has to take the picture.  This weekend we had the chance to meet fellow gamer Adam, a  math professor at CSU Fullerton, who gamed with us and took a picture of our family.  He was a keynote speaker at the CMC^3 Math Conference in Monterey, which is where we were this weekend.  I made sure to connect with him, as I had read in his bio that he has created a freshman-level class on problem solving based entirely on board games.  How cool is that?!?!?!?  I connected with him after his keynote address, and we decided to be in contact after dinner to see if gaming would work out, and it did!  As had we, he too had brought a bag of board games along "just in case."  Below you see them all laid out on this table in the hotel lobby.  It was fun to see that so many of his games were ones we were familiar with (For Sale, Code Names, 7 Wonders, etc.), but som
Read more

Game 4: Huggermugger

Image
My son Jacob and I are the ones in the family who particularly enjoy word games, and since he and I were the only ones gaming tonight we reached for Huggermugger.  It's kind of a mash-up of Hangman, Trivial Pursuit, and Balderdash.  It's a game for 2 to 4 players or teams - though we've played with more in the past by simply adding an extra token. There are four categories: definitions (key), spelling (bee), unscramble (soup), and miscellaneous (horseshoes).  For miscellaneous you might be asked to find 12 words using the letters of another word, to find 10 words that rhyme with a given word, to complete a quote, etc. When you land on a numbered spot on the edge of the board, if you answer a question correctly, you get to look under the dial labeled with that number.  The goal of the game is to be the first person to determine the mystery word on the mystery wheel. If you guess wrong, you lose, but if you wait too long before guessing someone else might beat you t
Read more

Game 118: Cities and Knights of Catan

Image
  Cities and Knights of Catan is an expansion to Settlers of Catan .  It's been on our shelves for a LONG time (probably as long ago as 1998 when it first came out), but it's also been a long time since we played it; it's probably been over a decade at this point.  Normally if we're going in this "direction," we just grab the original Catan off the shelf.  I do remember playing this one quite a bit, though, in the early days, especially with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law Tony and Stacey.  I think this expansion is a very nice addition to the original game, but over the years David has tended to get more and more tired of extra complication, which is probably part of why we haven't played this in a long time.  Of course we have lots of other options of games to play too, so it's not JUST that.  Among the things this expansion adds are knights (and I've always been one for chivalry, so I'm all about that!) and barbarians and walled cities.
Read more