All the Games on Our Shelves

I cannot believe I hadn't written about this game yet.  We've played it so many times since I began this blog.  I only post games that we are playing for the first time since the inception of this blog, and we play this game so much that I and the rest of the family just assumed I had posted about it already!  Despite its edgy, punny name, it's an elegant game - elegant in its simplicity.  It's also very fast paced.  It can bring about a lot of laughter as things get pretty heated (when the stealing begins), but it can also get pretty frustrating and feel a bit personal when you're the one getting stolen from all the time - never getting a chance to "cover your assets."  It's OK, though, because it goes so fast that you can just play another round, and chances are the the tables will turn on someone else, and you'll come out on top! The photo above is of what I was dealt to begin the game.  The fact that I had pairs of cards was really SWEE...

I don't know that we'd ever played standard Dominos with this set.  I know we've played the Mexican Train version of dominoes and that years ago we went through a short phase where we were pretty hooked on that.  I had played standard Dominos (or seen it played) at my grandfather's house when I was a kid.  Yesterday, Caleb, who had just learned Dominos from friends at a youth leadership retreat, asked if we wanted to play.  This was a fun game to relearn.  Classics always appeal to me!  (And the dominoes have such a good feel to them as well.)  Though this is a double-15 set, we played only a double-6 version.  We had to use a double-15 as a double-1, however, since I took a domino to my office as a demo for a math problem, and it has stayed there ever since.  If you pay attention as you look at the pictures, you'll see a double-15 where a double-1 should be.  Other than this, I'm mostly going to let the pictures speak for themselves...

 Caleb gave this game to David for his birthday last week.  We opened it Saturday and played the first round.  It is a legacy game - in other words, a game that will be built as we play over a series of gaming sessions.  As a family we've played one other legacy game, Pandemic Legacy .  That game was cooperative; this one is competitive.  I prefer cooperative games, but a nice feature of this game is that once we build the board (the village) in our first play-through, we will have created a game that we can continue to play in the future.  With Pandemic Legacy , that wasn't the case; once we played through it, it was just done and unable to be played again.  It was a great game - one of my absolute favorite gaming experiences ever - but it's certainly a bummer that we can't play it again.  There are pros and cons to everything, I guess.  With Charterstone , we have only played the first round, which seems to be mostly intended to jus...

 As the pandemic rages on across our world, we've been taking opportunities here and there to use technology to connect with family across the globe.  For us this generally involves engaging in gaming together.  This past week a family member in Michigan found a way to modify the game Mind Trap to draw us together.  We found this to be a very good choice for distanced game play.  And, since it is a game that is also on our shelves, it is being counted here and is game 111.  I don't have a lot of pictures to share with this one, but I've photographed a few cards in order to give the idea of the questions and challenged involved in this game.  Here are the components for standard game play.  Teams take turns pulling one card from the box.  I always appreciate some clever artistry in the design, and I particularly like the look of the score pad for this one.  Of course, we didn't use it in our modified multi-team global pla...

I never give up on a game.  This one has been on my shelf (in 6 different houses now) for FORTY-TWO YEARS!  I bought it when I was in junior high.  I don't even know how I was able to afford it.  I must have saved every penny of my babysitting money for a very long time.  I was a fanatic about all things Tolkien, and so I had to have this game.  It has never been played.  It's gorgeous, and it's in nearly mint condition.  I simply didn't know any gamers when I was that age.  I was not able to figure it out on my own, and even if I had been, I would have had no one to play it with.  Despite all that, it was important enough to me to have this that I spent what was probably all the money I had on this game when I was a kid.  Someday I hope to play it, and despite the fact that I haven't done so yet, after 42 years there it certainly deserves to be counted as a game on my shelf!  Obviously it was the 1970s, and obviously ...

In the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, I thought we would be playing far more games.  Perhaps I should say that I thought that at this time of pandemic that we would be making good progress through the uncounted games on our shelves, but this has not been the case.  We've been doing a reasonable amount of gaming, but it's mostly been just a few favorites (that I've already posted about).  Maybe games are like food in some sense, and just as there is comfort food there are "comfort games."  Despite it being pretty new to us, the game we've been addicted to in recent months is Quacks of Quedlinburg .  Since we're not playing our way through the uncounted games right now, I thought I'd put up a post or two of games on our shelves that I just can't get rid of but that for some reason or other are not exactly playable to us currently.  One of these is Dragon Dice .  I was drawn to this game immediately, as there is very little in life that ...