All the Games on Our Shelves

My previous post was of a Christmas gift I received, and this post is of a Christmas gift I gave: the Dolphins & Squids & 5-6 Player Expansion to Survive: Escape from Atlantis .  This one was my gift to Jacob, and it was really cool to be able to play Survive: Escape from Atlantis with more than 4 people - especially given our full house right now.  This expansion does more than allowing for additional players, however.  It adds squid (which can eat you on shore or destroy your boat and eat you); it adds dolphins (that can protect you from sharks); and it takes away the tile that allows you to swim on a dolphin.  I've already posted about the original game, so if you'd like more details about play see that post .  Reading of directions and setting up is going on above.  Below is our randomized island configuration.  The randomization makes for a new game every time. Once the island is set up it gets populated.  With more players it's quite a bit more

Forbidden Sky was a Christmas gift to me from Ocean.  We played it yesterday for the first time.  It's both similar to and significantly different from Forbidden Island , which I posted about previously .  I had heard from gaming friends that this was a good one, so it found a place on my Christmas list.  I was impressed with how it played, and I am eager to play more.  I also love that each time I play it I'll think of Ocean who gifted it to me. In the picture below we are reading directions and setting up. As with Forbidden Island , this is a cooperative game.  Also, as with Forbidden Island , each character has a role, and each role involves special abilities which will, hopefully, help the team beat the game. Each player has health and rope (we are in space, and cosmic storms can blow us off our platforms).  If any player runs out of health or rope, they die, and the whole team loses. Also, as with Forbidden Island , there are cards that are drawn at the e

 Seven Wonders Duel is a game Jacob gave me and David just prior to one of our "empty-nesting" stints.  We haven't been empty nesting lately, so this has stayed on the shelf as we have chosen games that include more people.  Anthony and David played this yesterday, though, and Anthony and I were free this morning so we challenged each other to a duel. (Christmas break is awesome - just sayin'.) I have often found that variations such as this don't work well, but this one is very satisfying. I would even say satisfying to the level of the original Seven Wonders , which is one of our very favorite games.  Above is the original set up - the first age.  Before beginning to take or buy cards from the pyramid above, players choose "wonders" to build.  Below is a picture of the wonders I chose.  There is a cost to each, and each provides various benefits - victory points or an extra turn or military advancement or coins or various other things.  Bel

I've already posted about, and counted, the standard game of Settlers of Catan .  We do have two copies, however, and we use them in tandem to play Double Catan . I mentioned in my earlier post on Settlers of Catan , that though this game is a modern classic that generally plays really well it has what seems to me one major flaw, and that is that a player can get absolutely stuck - unable to get resources, unable to get other people to trade with them - and then that person just sits there for 60 to 90 minutes frustrated and bored to death.  That's not to say that that happens often, but it happened enough that I was kind of turned off to the game for a while.  I find that Double Catan gets around that possibility by and large. In Double Catan you set up two boards and have two to four players per board.  Each player has a counterpart at the other board.  When any player rolls 2 or 12, that player and his counterpart switch places.  This keeps things pretty lively, as

Literati is a game that goes way back for us.  David found it at a garage sale not long after we moved to California (so 1989 or 1990-ish).   Literari  is a word game in which you make up definitions for words or guess the name of the author of a quote.  It is similar to Balderdash , but it is less varied in its categories - more word-focused and also more difficult.  We used to play it frequently with our friends Chuck and Sue, and I remember some very late nights and lots of laughter from those days!  I can still remember some of the definitions that were made up on those evenings nearly 30 years ago now!  We hadn't played it for years, probably because Balderdash is easier and more varied, which makes it the game of this sort that we normally play with guests.  Yesterday I asked Ocean, Jacob and Caleb if they would play this oldie-but-goodie with me, and they agreed.  Jacob (white/grey pawn) took an early lead, which isn't surprising.  I don't call him "Word