Game 66: Deception - Undercover Allies Expansion

 Compared to summer, my posting has been pretty sparse of late, but I have finished grading final exams and entering grades and responding to student emails and  .  .  .  and  .  .  .  and  .  .  .  I'm going to call this particularly rough semester over at this point.  So I am finally available for significant gaming again!  Additionally, we made two pick-ups at the airport yesterday - Caleb who is home from college - and Ocean who is with us for the first time and will spend the whole holiday season with us - yea!  So we have more gamers around - yea again!  Tonight we played our first (non-video) game of the season, the Undercover Allies expansion of Deception.
 As I've mentioned, counting games is always a little tricky for me.  For some games that we have multiple expansions for such as Dominion, 7 Wonders, and Carcassone (making up many boxes and taking up much space on our shelves), I am counting the game only once.  This is especially the case since when playing those games we typically play with all of the expansions together.  With Settlers of Catan however, since the original seems so different from the Cities and Knights expansion, I will count those as two games.  I'm doing the same thing here with Deception, since we'd been playing the original for months and just now (with Caleb's arrival) have the expansion.
 The expansion actually just adds extra cards and plays out the same way as the original, but after having played the original a number of time, the cards did seem to get over-used after a while, so it really is nice to have more variety.  Above is a photo of my means (blue) cards and clue (red) cards from one round.  If I were the murderer in this round I would have picked one each from red and from blue as the means and the evidence relating to my crime.  The person in the forensic scientist role would then use scene tiles to try to lead the other players (investigators) to guess the identity of the murderer.  In the photo below Caleb is the forensic scientist, so he's getting ready to lay out the scene tiles to help the investigation.  Though Ocean has certainly gamed before, it hasn't been to the degree or intensity that takes place around here, so we're hoping not to overwhelm her over the three weeks she is with us!  We had good times and lots of laughs tonight!
 Below is a new set-up with David as forensic scientist.  I snapped this shot as he was trying to decide which word to use as a description of the duration of the crime, using, quite appropriately, bullets as markers.  I find it quite hard to play the role of forensic scientist, because it's hard for me not to give things away by facial expressions or comments!
 The event tiles shown below are part of a variant of the original game.  We had not used them until tonight. Along with the new cards, they provided a fun twist as well.
 Below is another set-up that I had.  I wasn't the murder, but had I been I think it would have been hard for the investigators to select my two cards (one red, one blue), as each of my blue cards could be labeled as severe injury  .  .  .
I'm restricting my blog to board games and card games, but there's been a lot of video-gaming going on today, some of which I've been part of and some of which I haven't.  Caleb totally surprised me by calling me upstairs today to play a new video game he'd taken home from college, and it was Jeopardy!  I was surprised and touched, because he knows Jeopardy! is my thing.  For better or for worse things were very much in his favor because he does a lot of video-gaming, and I don't, so he was able to ring in ahead of me nearly every time.  On the other hand, I have the advantage, having been on the actual Jeopardy! TV show, so I guess having a handicap is only fair.  Jacob, Caleb and Ocean just headed upstairs for more video-gaming and invited me to join them, so as soon as I hit the publish button here it's off to the game room for me!  School's out!  HOORAY!!

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