All the Games on Our Shelves

 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...

 YEA!!  After a month of finishing out the semester and then traveling for two weeks, I'm back to gaming again!  I've also got two of my three boys home - we have Jacob here between travels to Australia and Germany, and Caleb is back from Michigan and not yet out at the coast.  The upshot of this is that I get to play MAGIC again, and that makes me happy!!  We played Planechase, which is not a format I had yet posted about here, and so here you have it. Before moving on into that, though, I'm going to be a little bit negative.  I am a gamer - duh, see blog.  I spend time in gaming stores here at home.  My house is filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands of games.  I game whenever I get a chance. SO  .  .  .  on my recent trip to Edinburgh, I thought I'd check out the gaming scene.  I didn't just want to do the touristy thing; I wanted to get local and hang out with "my kind" of people.  I was curious about th...

 We bought this game about 20 years ago, back when my parents had a small place near the Monterey Coast and our boys were little.  We would take a day trip into Carmel-by-the-Sea where, for me, the draw was not the beach but rather the game store.  I've always been drawn to beautiful woodwork as well as to games, so once I set eyes upon this game I wanted it desperately.  If you take a look at the photograph posted 3 down from here you'll see what we paid 20 years ago when we were pretty much flat broke.  I can't believe David ever said "OK" to this!  Now you can get it for less than $25 on ebay (which tells you something!).  The board is elegantly crafted, which makes it feel satisfying to play with, but I haven't yet really been delighted with the game itself - alas.  David and I did get it out again about a week ago, and I'm ready to give it a few more tries to see if I can make something of the strategy and yet develop a taste for it. ...

 Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers is one of a whole family of Carcassonne games.  I posted previously about the original Carcassonne game .  The idea here is similar to the original, but it's also different enough to have quite a different feel to it.  This version is set in the same area as Carcassonne but during the stone age rather than during medieval times.  Instead of dealing with cities, abbeys, and roads, in Hunters and Gatherers you are dealing with forests, streams and wild game.  In the next two pictures I've photographed tiles from each of these games (one orderly, one random), just to give an idea of the different landscape.  The tiles start out upside-down, of course, and players take turns choosing a tile and connecting it to the ever-expanding board and earning points for completing forests, completing rivers, and hunting game.  Game elements are claimed by placing meeples or huts on tiles.  Huts are only used...

 No Thanks is a game that was introduced to us by Adam back in December at a math conference.  David got it for me as a late Christmas gift, but by the time it got here all our kids had left again.  This is a 3-7 player game, so we had to wait to get together with friends in order to play.  The game is incredibly simple to learn, but we are still struggling with what the most successful strategies might be for the win.  We played this a couple of weeks ago with a group of 4, and we played it again this last weekend with a group of 6, and we've found that it has a rather different feel depending on the number of players. My set (above) has a different style than Adam's set (below).  The chips in his set are more like mini-poker chips, and in our set they are like Go stones.  Also, the cards in my set have quotes surrounding the center that kind of taunt players regarding whether or not to take the card.  I'm not sure how well you can read...