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 and such. I don't really have an idea yet of what the win condition is or of any sort of goal I should be shooting for. I was really tired when we played, so I was barely grasping the basic rules, which is frustrating, but something about the game drew me in nonetheless, and I woke up the next morning thinking about it. I'm looking forward to moving on into this game and seeing what it has to offer. As we do continue gaming, I will post more pictures and more information. The photos that are up here are just of the initial opening and set-up.
As with Pandemic Legacy, you get to name the people and places in the game. It took me the whole round, but I decided that my character, seen on the card at the left below, shall be named "Sophie." I've got the forest region and am not yet sure what I will name that area.
Anthony and fam were visiting from LA. The other guys don't like me taking pictures of their faces when we play, so I'm glad he was "game" to get his face in the photo!
UPDATE: Here's what the board looks like after game 8.
I keep forgetting to have my camera handy as we play. As well as building the board game-by-game, we also get new minions and tokens and cards and such. I'll try to have the camera handy next time so I can show all the associated "toys" as well.
UPDATE 2: We played game 9 tonight, August 12, 2020, and I finally felt like I really have the hang of this. I got a lot of good combos going with my cards and buildings, and that helped me get lots of "goodies" during the game, which sets me up well for the next game.
I get a little messier with my pieces mid-game:
Jacob opened a create, so we got new cards and such:
Here's my view of the board from my corner of the world:
There's a new twist each time, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller. Here's the card giving us temporary directions for this game:
And so the candle is lit . . .
. . . and so it burns as we hold our breaths (or not) and hope it does not go out on our turn.
The candle did not burn out on anyone's turn; it burned for the whole game! So we blew it out at the end, and we all got a victory and the condition that was under the scratch-off on the card, which will remain secret so as not to spoil it. We now have three more games in Legacy mode.
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
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
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.
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