All the Games on Our Shelves

 Compared to summer, my posting has been pretty sparse of late, but I have finished grading final exams and entering grades and responding to student emails and  .  .  .  and  .  .  .  and  .  .  .  I'm going to call this particularly rough semester over at this point.  So I am finally available for significant gaming again!  Additionally, we made two pick-ups at the airport yesterday - Caleb who is home from college - and Ocean who is with us for the first time and will spend the whole holiday season with us - yea!  So we have more gamers around - yea again!  Tonight we played our first (non-video) game of the season, the Undercover Allies expansion of Deception .  As I've mentioned, counting games is always a little tricky for me.  For some games that we have multiple expansions for such as Dominion,   7 Wonders , and Carcassone (making up many boxes and taking up much space on o...

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, Cod...

 David, Jacob and I got to go away this weekend, since I had a math conference to attend (California Mathematics Council Community Colleges, or CMC^3).  We packed games to take along, as we always do, and I came back to the hotel room the first evening to find David and Jacob playing Hey, That's My Fish!   For better or for worse I was at conference sessions while they took advantage of the hotel amenities (hot tub, ping-pong, etc.), beautiful downtown Monterey, California, and gaming!  That's cool with me, though, as I love to give them opportunity to have time away, and I actually really enjoy math conferences, as they get me fired up again for my classroom work!  A particular highlight of this conference was getting to know the keynote speaker who is also a gamer and who has created a freshman-level problem solving class based on board games, but more about him in my next post.  I'm really surprised we hadn't played Hey, That's My Fish!  since ...

 The game Saboteur was introduced to us a couple of years back by our friends the Gerdes Family.  It's a good one, but it had been a while since we'd played it.  We pulled it out early in this Thanksgiving week and played with family who had arrived from Southern California.  We use a combination of the original and the Saboteur 2 expansion.  It's a game that can easily be taken more or less seriously, as the mood dictates.  I was more interested in visiting with family than in being super strategic, and it worked just fine.  This is a game involving dwarves mining for gold.  Each player has a secret role (blue dwarf, green dwarf, boss dwarf, saboteur, engineer, etc.) for which they gain more or less gold at the end of each round depending on how the building of the mine goes.  The building starts with the card you see in the foreground in the picture above - the card with the ladder on it.  For most players, the crystals you see ...

 If you compare my rate of posting from this summer when I began this game blog to my rate of posting this fall as I'm back in the classroom, you'll see a DRASTIC drop in the number of opportunities we have to play games.  Also, if you look at most of my posts, you'll see that the majority of game times involve just our immediate family, as we are a rather introverted bunch of homebodies.  However, we have recently had opportunity to be hosted and to host, and, of course, gaming was part of that!  The first game here is Set Cubed , which is a board game based on the Set card game .  I didn't play, since I was getting in some "grandma time" and holding my new baby granddaughter Maleah, but Maleah and I were right there on the side taking in all the action.  This all took place in Southern California where we were visiting for our grandson Declan's second birthday and to welcome our new granddaughter, 3-day-old Maleah, into the world.  It was a q...

 Forbidden Island is a family favorite.  I like it because it's cooperative, so we all win or lose together - usually win, but it was a close call tonight!  I'm kind surprised it's such a favorite for us, as at least one of my sons is not much of a fan of cooperative games - likes to make his own choices!  I like the artwork and the pieces.  Also, the game plays well and tells a good story.  Basically each player is a member of a group of explorers on an island that is sinking, and the goal is to get the four treasures and to fly off the island without drowning.  Above is our initial set- up for tonight.  Cards are always placed randomly, but in the same shape as shown above.  Here are the treasures to be claimed.  During each turn a player takes 3 actions.  He can move to another tile (orthogonally), shore up sinking tiles, hand off a treasure card to another player with whom he is sharing a tile, use his special abilit...