Game 76: Can't Stop Express

 After the ridiculously long time period of three weeks we finally played another game!  Much more time away and I may have gone through withdrawals - or maybe I have been experiencing withdrawal, and that's why I haven't been feeling well lately!  Either way, I'm thankful the game-drought has ended!  The game Can't Stop Express was a recent Christmas gift to me from David.  He hadn't been able to find the large, board-game version (at least not at a reasonable price) so he read-up on this version of it and decided to go for it.  I must say that when I first opened the box today I was quite underwhelmed, particularly because I had played the board-game version previously.  This version is just 5 dice, directions, and a score-pad.  OK  .  .  .
 Above is what I opened today; below is the board game version that our friends the Kirks introduced us to.  As you can imagine, I felt that a lot was missing!
 So we "rolled our dice and moved our mice" - well, no, there were no mice involved, but we rolled our dice and filled in our score sheets, and we found this game incredibly addictive!  We had other things to do today, so we only played two round of it this afternoon, but we are going to pick it up again tonight!
 I'm frequently embarrassed, given that I'm a mathematician, that I don't typically immediately dominate in games of this nature - involving probability and risk management.  Alas  .  .  .  at least we both improved.  I think I get the trophy for most improved!  (Yes, the initial scores are indeed -1050 to 80.)


We were both hungering for gaming today, so David grabbed another game off the shelves, one we haven't played in a LONG time.  A game from our childhoods that was reasonably popular in its day, a game that is mainly a game of logic.  Any guesses as to what that game might be?  You'll see in the next post!

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