All the Games on Our Shelves

  The game HerStory was another gift from my brother - no special occasion, just thought I would like it. I love history, and I am a woman, so, you know  .  .  .  Anyway, we've played it a couple of times this weekend, and it is a very nice game. It is a resource management game and has elements of Splendor and a hint of Dominion (but just a hint) and also a tiny hint of Wingspan ,  but it's nowhere near as strategic as any of those. It's a very casual strategy game. I think the more we play it the more strategic we'll be able to be because we'll know better what all of the cards do - what to look for - what kinds of combos we can make. Some cards provide symbols to help you build other cards, some have game-end bonuses, others have bonuses during play if you're in last place, others have high value but no other bonus, etc.  Though the strategy is pretty light, there is some strategy to it. The first time we played, I was going for big point value c...

  This game was given to me by my brother. If he sees something he thinks someone will like, he buys it for them, so that is how I came to own this game. The game is basically Chutes and Ladders combined with trivia, so it's almost entirely based on luck. If you land on a square with a letter symbol or a book symbol on it, then you answer a question on a card. If you get it right, you spin again; if you get it wrong, then your turn ends. There are blank squares on which nothing special happens and the turn just passes. The spaces that cause ascent or descent are kind of clever. The base of each ladder is a property such as Netherfield or Pemberely. The top of each rope (chute) is a "spoiler" - a character from Pride and Prejudice who interfers with the course of a romantic relationship. There are some other twists to basic Chutes and Ladders such as what happens when you reach squares 89-99 and what happens if you land on your "perfect match." The questions ar...

  This was a birthday gift to me this year, um, actually for my most recent birthday, which was "last" year now that it's 2023.  How is it that it's already FEBRUARY 2023?  Wasn't it just 2022 like yesterday?  I am so far behind on my blogging!  It used to be that I was too busy with work to maintain my blog, but now that I've retired (as of December), I'm too busy writing books and starting up a YouTube channel and trying to get back in shape.  So my gaming blog continues to languish.  Alas  .  .  .  but we do continue to PLAY games, and that's the important thing!  I first played this game with some of my colleagues earlier last year, and really liked it, so it ended up on my birthday list.  I've played many games that involve building some sort of domain, but all previous ones had been on a flat surface.  The fact that the building here is in 3D really intrigued me.  The polygonal terrain pieces reminded me a ...

  Anthony brought this game with him when he and his family headed up north to our place for Christmas break.  We enjoyed it so much that David promptly ordered one for us.  The package arrived today, and we just finished playing our first game together.  It's a good combination of strategy and luck, though somewhat heavier on strategy, I'd say.  We are pleased with the quality of it - the feel and look of the tiles and gems, the solid box that folds over and closes magnetically, etc.  Unfortunately, ours arrived with one side of the box torn in two places.  I'm not sure how that could have happened, as it was well-packed and was sealed in it's original plastic wrapper.  We thought about returning it, but we'd enjoyed it so much that we didn't have the patience to send it back and wait for another one, so we're just taping up the tears.  Here are the opening few moves to our first game. You begin with 5 tiles, and you draw-up again after your...

  I can't believe I hadn't yet posted on this common classic, Sequence .  Caleb requested to play this today, after I had suggested Dominion and Splendor .  He wasn't in the mood for that sort of game (unusual!) and went upstairs to look at the shelves.  He saw this and said he remembered it being one of his favorite games in childhood.  So we played.  We used to play it quite a bit -- decades ago!  It's not one I've been drawn to because it's so simple and doesn't involve a lot of strategy, but I was pleasantly surprised at how engaging I found it to be today.   The game consists of a board with a grid of card images on it, and you begin with 7 cards in your hand.  You can play a token of your color on a spot on the board that matches your card.  (There are more than one of each.)  The goal is to be the first to get two sequences, a sequence being five in a row.  There are no jacks on the board, as they have special abil...

  Tis the season!  More posts are going up because more gaming is going on, and I imagine many will continue to be "bonus" posts, in other words posts about games that are not on OUR shelves.  This is a new game of my brother's, and the boys brought it to our house today.   They'd had a good time playing it recently and wanted to share it with us.  I have to agree that it is fun.  My take on it is that it's the hardest word game ever combined with the easiest Dungeons & Dragons campaign ever.  Actually, the game isn't hard at all, what is hard is trying to come up with effective words as "traps" for the other team and trying to guess your team's word while avoiding their traps.  OK, that probably makes no sense.  I think I'm having a hard time writing simply because I just finished playing and so have spent a lot of time describing a word while trying to imagine (and not say) words the other team might think I will say while trying t...

It seems things are turning around, as this is my second post in two days!  Decktective: Nightmare in the Mirror is a game that involves solving a mystery, so you can only play it once.  The idea is that you then pass it on to a friend.  Tim, Jacob and Caleb had already played it, so they brought it over for me and David to play as well.  Jacob took it home tonight, and they'll be passing it on to another of their gaming friends.  I can't/shouldn't shared too many pictures, as I don't want to give too much away.  In fact, you may not want to look further at all, just in case I accidentally end up spoiling something small even with these quite generic pictures.  It is a good game.  I do recommend it.  It takes about an hour to play.  We were really tired, so it took us about an hour and a half! The cards are in the box in a specific order, and you do have to play through it in that order.  It begins with a card containing the set-up...

  Well, it's kinda weird that the "bonus" posts are far outnumbering the "standard" posts.  I think some sort of malaise due to the pandemic and having had to teach remotely for the last three semesters has just kind of settled over me - am not gaming as much as usual, and even when I do, I'm not posting about it.  I see that my last post was in July, and it is now December!  We actually have played "new" games between now and then, a couple in August and at least one in the intervening months, and I did take pictures, but at this point I don't even know which SD card the images are on.  Hopefully the New Year, 2022, will bring better things to us all!  Anyway  .  .  .  this is a "bonus" post because this game, Tiny Towns , is not on OUR shelves, but rather on our son Caleb's shelf.  He and I are both on kind of a holiday break, so he came by this past week and introduced me to Tiny Towns .  It's a game, where, as you might ha...

  It's rather hard for me to believe that in the 3 years I've been working on this project of playing through all the games on our shelves that we had not yet played this game.  It seems especially strange to me that we had not played Pandemic in the last 15 months, given that we've been living through one!  Pandemic (the game) is a cooperative game, one that we had often played but always with 4 people, and which we have almost invariably won.  This is our first time trying the 2-player version; we played last night and this afternoon, and we lost both times!  I'm not sure yet if the 2-player version is just that much harder or if David and I are just out of practice.  Despite our losses, we are eager to play again, and we have just left it set up on the table so we can get in another game tonight.  We do want to save the world, after all! And we are particularly motivated to do so given the times in which we live! Above and below are a couple of pi...