All the Games on Our Shelves

  Cathedral is a game from early in our marriage.  I love anything that has to do with medieval times, castles or cathedrals, and I love anything that's as beautifully hand-crafted as this, especially of wood.  And, as I've mentioned so many times before, David is really good at games of territory, which this is, so I certainly always know I'm going to be challenged and more than challenged, which is fine with me.  David did win the first game 8 to 0, but we did tie in the second and final game.  The first piece to be played is the cathedral, which is a neutral piece.  You may play pieces anywhere, but one goal is to claim territory by connecting edges of the board - at which point you are the only person allowed to play in the claimed space, and if one (and only one) of your opponents pieces ended up in space you claimed, then that piece is removed and returned to that player.  It can be played again in a legal space, but it basically amounts...

 The game of Pinochle involves its own special deck of cards rather than a standard Poker deck.  It has two of all the cards 9 through Ace, so there are 48 cards rather than the standard 52.  Once upon a time, when I was a child, I wanted to purchase a deck of cards for my very own.  I went to the Raley's grocery store, and, being a young child and having very little money, I bought the cheapest deck of cards I could find.  When I got home and opened the deck, I was very surprised and disappointed to find that this deck had 2 of all the face cards but no cards below 9.  It turns out that the reason this deck was cheaper was that it was a Pinochle deck of only 48 cards, rather than a standard deck of 52 cards. I was disappointed then, but I'm very happy to have Pinochle decks to play from today!  Normally my school year is too busy to allow for getting together with friends (you may have noticed how my posting has slowed since summer!), but I'm tr...

 Kingdomino was one of my birthday gifts this week.  It has been on my wish list since our friends the Kirks introduced us to it earlier this year.  It is the 2017 Game of the Year award winner, and it is very deserving of the award.  In this game each player builds his kingdom (a 5x5 grid) using domino-shaped terrain tiles.  Each domino must be placed in such a way that at least one of its halves touches terrain of the same type orthogonally.  The start-tile for each person is a 1x1 square that is "wild;" terrain of any type may be played against this piece.  Points are scored by multiplying the number of tiles of a given territory (all connected) by the number of crowns appearing on tiles in that territory.  The player with the highest total wins.  Above is a picture of the game after 3 turns.  Below is a picture as we near completion of our kingdoms.  We use "king meeples" to select the terrain domino that we want.  ...

We have finally come to the end of summer birthdays in the family - with mine - and the game Prime Climb was one of my gifts, and what a perfect gift a game about primes is! I'm a gamer and a mathematician and just turned a prime number of years old on this birthday!  (I also received the game Kingdomino - planning to play and post soon!)  Although this was a perfect gift, I feel I can't do a good write-up on it yet, as this day was not only my birthday but also the first day of the semester, and I was utterly exhausted by evening - having stood and lectured for nearly 5 hours straight (after having been on break) and having been absolutely swarmed by students about enrolling, wait-lists, add codes, etc.  We played it that night anyway, but not until very late, so I was not thinking at all about strategy - in fact, I don't think I was thinking, period!  We have a long weekend coming up, so we'll have to give it another try.  I have a mathematician friend ...

 I'm so glad we've decided to play through all the games on our shelves, because with as many games as we have it is easy to get into ruts and to forget some games completely - thus losing some minor gems.  The game Guillotine is one of those minor gems, and we had a great time playing it today (which probably sounds rather macabre!).  Basically the game is set during the French Revolution, and nobles are lined up to be guillotined.  You earn points depending on the "status" of the noble (for example, Marie Antoinette is worth 5 points, Robespierre is worth 3, and Lady in Waiting is worth 1), and the person with the most points at the end of the third round (i.e. the third "day") is the winner.  Each "day" there are 12 "nobles" lined up for the guillotine.  I put "nobles" in quotes because there are also such characters as Martyrs and The Hero of the People, and if you end up beheading them you lose points!  Some charac...

HOORAY!  A trivia game!! I like the twist to this trivia game; rather than just answering questions, you are given three terms, and you have to determine what links them.  For instance, if the three terms are JUPITER, BLUE WHALE, SEQUOIA, you would need to answer that these three things are each the largest of their type.  There are 4 categories: entertainment, sport and recreation, academics and miscellaneous.  You roll a die to determine what category you get, but there are two other symbols on the die - one let's you choose your own category, and one gives you a free play.  There are three tracks that you need to complete before winning.  There are multiple different ways to challenge other people (and possibly move yourself ahead while sending them back), so part of the play has to do with decisions about whether to make a break for it on one track or to try to make a bit of progress on all three tracks.  Both David and Jacob were partic...

  Quixo (pronounced "key-so") is an award-winning game of pure strategy.  As a family we tend to focus on games that have more of a story to them, such as Stoneage or Settler's of Catan or Karuba or Escape from Atlantis , but every so often I need to get back to pure strategy.  Jacob is out gaming with friends from work tonight leaving David and me home together, and this was our choice of game for our evening. It had been quite a while since we played it, so we had to take out the rules and pursue them for clarity on a couple of things, but the rules are very simple, and within minutes we were ready to get started.  This game brought to mind a special day that my oldest son and I had many years ago.  It was a day when everyone else was back to school, but he and I weren't yet.  We decided to play all the games we owned that started with the letter Q in one day, and I posted about that on my general blog, a post which you can find at  this link...

We love the "newer" games such as Settlers of Catan and Seven Wonders , but classics are classics for a reason, and it was high time we play one!  It's tons of fun to play the newest award-winning game, but things move into a different realm altogether when playing a game that's survived for millennia.  When I play a classic game such as Backgammon , Chess , Go , or Nine Men's Morris , I feel like I am entering the sweep of history.  It's almost like time travel.  I'm also intrigued by chess because I've always had an affinity for royalty, and this not only contains pieces relating to a royal court, but it has also been called The Game of Kings . As much as I hold this game in honor, I don't play it often.  For as much as I like to think and strategize, I find that the level of thinking required in chess can be intensely stressful, and as a mathematician I feel as if there is an expectation for me to be a formidable player, which adds even m...

We played our new game Rumis this morning just before saying "good-bye" to Anthony, Brianna, and Declan.  They gave this to us last night as a combined birthday gift, and it's a good gift!  It's a game of maximizing territory -- not the usual 2-dimensional territory but rising up into 3 dimensions!  And the important part is where you end up at the top of the structure.  As you build up with your "stones" (or "rumi") your newly laid stones need to touch at least one face of one of your previously laid pieces.  Surprising things can happen as people try to block each other and ways are found to sneak through.  It can get pretty frustrating!  But it's a fun frustration!  There are multiple layouts, and they are intended to represent elements of ancient Mayan civilization: pyramid, tower, wall, and stairs.  I like the flavor that this gives to the game.  Our version is the classic, which first came out in the early 2000s....