All the Games on Our Shelves

 It is summer, and that means I have time to get together with friends!  As I look back, I see that this is our fourth game night with the Kirk family since I began this blog.  The picture above is of the games - some ours, some theirs - that were stacked up on their kitchen counter to select from over the course of the evening.  We ended up playing Deception , Bonkers , Barenpark, and Settlers of Catan (double).  Barenpark ("Bear Park") was new to us.  Tyler had gotten it as a birthday gift earlier in the week from Anna, and they taught us how to play.  It felt to me like a combination between Tetris , Kingdomino , and Cathedral .  We all really enjoyed it.  The game is pretty easy to play, but I'm finding it hard to explain right now - maybe because I'm posting late at night.  Basically, the idea is to build a bear park (koalas, pandas, polar bears, etc.) including enclosures, water features, playground areas, monuments, etc...

 So  .  .  .  we've had Puerto Rico pretty much since it first came out in 2002.  We used to play it a lot.  I've always really liked it and had been wanting to play it again for years (literally years).  For some reason this one has fallen out of favor with my boys.  I think the comment I've heard from them is that the play is too predictable and that once you choose a strategy you're stuck with it so you can't really change things up mid-game.  I typically join in with whatever others are playing rather than being the one to choose the game, but I recently insisted on having my way (so bossy!).  I've been wanting to play this, AND we're supposed to be playing through ALL the games on our shelves - which is the point of this blog - a project at which we are not making very speedy progress.  It's hard to make progress when we keep going back to playing our current favorites over and over.  So here we are up to game 83 (...