All the Games on Our Shelves

  Cathedral is a game from early in our marriage.  I love anything that has to do with medieval times, castles or cathedrals, and I love anything that's as beautifully hand-crafted as this, especially of wood.  And, as I've mentioned so many times before, David is really good at games of territory, which this is, so I certainly always know I'm going to be challenged and more than challenged, which is fine with me.  David did win the first game 8 to 0, but we did tie in the second and final game.  The first piece to be played is the cathedral, which is a neutral piece.  You may play pieces anywhere, but one goal is to claim territory by connecting edges of the board - at which point you are the only person allowed to play in the claimed space, and if one (and only one) of your opponents pieces ended up in space you claimed, then that piece is removed and returned to that player.  It can be played again in a legal space, but it basically amounts to losing a turn, whi

 The game of Pinochle involves its own special deck of cards rather than a standard Poker deck.  It has two of all the cards 9 through Ace, so there are 48 cards rather than the standard 52.  Once upon a time, when I was a child, I wanted to purchase a deck of cards for my very own.  I went to the Raley's grocery store, and, being a young child and having very little money, I bought the cheapest deck of cards I could find.  When I got home and opened the deck, I was very surprised and disappointed to find that this deck had 2 of all the face cards but no cards below 9.  It turns out that the reason this deck was cheaper was that it was a Pinochle deck of only 48 cards, rather than a standard deck of 52 cards. I was disappointed then, but I'm very happy to have Pinochle decks to play from today!  Normally my school year is too busy to allow for getting together with friends (you may have noticed how my posting has slowed since summer!), but I'm trying to break out of t

 Kingdomino was one of my birthday gifts this week.  It has been on my wish list since our friends the Kirks introduced us to it earlier this year.  It is the 2017 Game of the Year award winner, and it is very deserving of the award.  In this game each player builds his kingdom (a 5x5 grid) using domino-shaped terrain tiles.  Each domino must be placed in such a way that at least one of its halves touches terrain of the same type orthogonally.  The start-tile for each person is a 1x1 square that is "wild;" terrain of any type may be played against this piece.  Points are scored by multiplying the number of tiles of a given territory (all connected) by the number of crowns appearing on tiles in that territory.  The player with the highest total wins.  Above is a picture of the game after 3 turns.  Below is a picture as we near completion of our kingdoms.  We use "king meeples" to select the terrain domino that we want.  The next set of 4 dominoes to select fr