All the Games on Our Shelves

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...

  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...

  I have to leave this game un-numbered for now, as it is not a game on OUR shelves.  It belongs to my brother, and our sons showed up with it this afternoon.  In Obscurio , the players (with two exceptions) are wizards who are trying to escape a sorcerer's library.  One player is a traitor who is trying to mislead the others; the traitor wins if escape doesn't happen.  One other player, known as the "grimoire" knows the correct door to choose for each round and tries to communicate it through images.  The game is a bit like Mysterium , but it has some interesting twists - not only is there a traitor, but there are also one or more "traps" in each round.  There is also a timer, and not finishing a round in time results in one or more extra traps in the next round; this certainly does keep the game moving.   It is a cooperative game, so players talk and try to help and convince each other of the right door to choose, but the traitor has a role...

  I just finished playing this game, Dead of Winter , for the first time. I've got so much adrenaline flowing through me that I'm not sure if I can write well about it right now.  Actually, I think I'd need to play it a few more times before I was able do a good job of describing the game with any sort of fulness, so for now I'm just going to introduce it and share a few pictures.  I'd seen Jacob and Caleb play this in the past, and, for as into gaming as I am, this just looked a little more complicated than was I was interested in taking on.  They (and Tim) invited me to play tonight, and I said "yes," and I'm so glad I did.  It's a lot of fun, and it's a mostly cooperative game.  I say "mostly cooperative" because it is possible for players to have a role of a betrayer and also because while there is a main objective/win condition, each player also has their own personal win condition.  As we played, I became aware that there were l...

  Amazing - the game designers have put the "escape room" experience into a board game!  I really enjoyed this - solving all the riddles and puzzles in order to try to escape the forbidden castle.  I felt that there was good variety in the puzzles and that we really needed the team effort in order to figure everything out.  As I say so often, I love cooperative games.  One of my sons was less impressed with this one, feeling that some of the puzzles were rather contrived or a bit clunky.  So I guess for our family the verdict is out.  Something that was a bummer for me is that this is a one-off.  Once you play it, you can never play it again, both because you've figured out all the riddles and also because you've had to destroy some of the items (cards, instruction manual, etc.) in order to do so!  Honestly, I think it was a great game, and I did enjoy it very much, but I really like games that are re-playable over and over, and I don't like ...

  Mysterium is a game we had played quite a while ago, having borrowed it from my brother.  It's one that intrigued us, and so it eventually ended up on our shelves as well.  We've had it for a while now, and David and the boys played it earlier in the semester, but I was too busy to join in.  I finally got my chance and am also finally getting a chance to post.  I'm not sure how best to describe this game.  In some sense it's a bit like a séance (though I know describing it that way will put some people off).  It feels to me like a combination of Clue , Dixit , and Deception .  It's a cooperative game in which players are trying to solve a murder.  It's the ghost of the murder victim who is giving clues to the other players, but he can only do so through images.  The images are pictured on cards, and I find the artwork to be gorgeous, evocative, and dreamlike. The ghost cannot speak, so the players trying to solve his murder have to do...

  This game came to our shelves via Jacob's last birthday, four months ago!  Yes, I'm going to continue to grouse a bit about the busyness of this semester!  I did take 2 days fully off over the 4-day Thanksgiving holiday, and gaming commenced!  This is a cooperative game, and I am a fan of cooperative games.  I like to work together with my family members rather than against them.  I'm eager to play this game a second time (Christmas break?) now that I have an idea of what the elements are.  Despite being intrepid gamers, we went with a pretty easy setting for our first game, and we won quite easily.  I think we will ratchet it up a notch or two (or more) next time we play.   Here we are getting it out of the box for the first time and taking a good look at the board. Basically the idea is that we are crew members of a besieged ship, and we are dealing with hostile aliens in the ship, damage to our shields, hostile alien ships attacking from...

 As we continue to enjoy our time with two sons at home, Caleb introduced us to Pandemic Legacy, his gift to the family.  He's been playing this with friends in Michigan and has really liked it.  I've heard great things from others who have played it as well.  Today we played the prologue phase, and we lost.  We could have won if we had reversed a couple of decisions, but I insisted we couldn't time travel and what was done was done.  The prologue feels very much like standard Pandemic - a game I love but which Caleb isn't a fan of, and which is why, after 82 game postings, it is still not one I've blogged about!  We'll be playing more phases of this in upcoming days, so for now I'm mostly just posting pictures of it without much more commentary.  One thing about the game is that you really individualize it.  For instance, we named the havens and wrote the names in permanent marker on the board.  We also choose and name our own char...