All the Games on Our Shelves

 Caleb gave this game to David for his birthday last week.  We opened it Saturday and played the first round.  It is a legacy game - in other words, a game that will be built as we play over a series of gaming sessions.  As a family we've played one other legacy game, Pandemic Legacy .  That game was cooperative; this one is competitive.  I prefer cooperative games, but a nice feature of this game is that once we build the board (the village) in our first play-through, we will have created a game that we can continue to play in the future.  With Pandemic Legacy , that wasn't the case; once we played through it, it was just done and unable to be played again.  It was a great game - one of my absolute favorite gaming experiences ever - but it's certainly a bummer that we can't play it again.  There are pros and cons to everything, I guess.  With Charterstone , we have only played the first round, which seems to be mostly intended to just get us used to the mechanics an

 As the pandemic rages on across our world, we've been taking opportunities here and there to use technology to connect with family across the globe.  For us this generally involves engaging in gaming together.  This past week a family member in Michigan found a way to modify the game Mind Trap to draw us together.  We found this to be a very good choice for distanced game play.  And, since it is a game that is also on our shelves, it is being counted here and is game 111.  I don't have a lot of pictures to share with this one, but I've photographed a few cards in order to give the idea of the questions and challenged involved in this game.  Here are the components for standard game play.  Teams take turns pulling one card from the box.  I always appreciate some clever artistry in the design, and I particularly like the look of the score pad for this one.  Of course, we didn't use it in our modified multi-team global play yesterday, but it's lovely

I never give up on a game.  This one has been on my shelf (in 6 different houses now) for FORTY-TWO YEARS!  I bought it when I was in junior high.  I don't even know how I was able to afford it.  I must have saved every penny of my babysitting money for a very long time.  I was a fanatic about all things Tolkien, and so I had to have this game.  It has never been played.  It's gorgeous, and it's in nearly mint condition.  I simply didn't know any gamers when I was that age.  I was not able to figure it out on my own, and even if I had been, I would have had no one to play it with.  Despite all that, it was important enough to me to have this that I spent what was probably all the money I had on this game when I was a kid.  Someday I hope to play it, and despite the fact that I haven't done so yet, after 42 years there it certainly deserves to be counted as a game on my shelf!  Obviously it was the 1970s, and obviously I wanted everyone to know this was MINE