A Gathering of Strangers

Last Friday I took work off and convinced Alicia that it would be a good idea to go to a board game convention. How I got her to agree to that I will never know. What can I say, I have an amazing wife. We ended up having a great time. We met some new people and played some great games. We got there around 3 and ended up leaving a little after 10. Here's a list of the games we played:

1. Ninja vs Ninja


2. Cover up


3. Mix up


4. Stone Age


5. Letter Flip


6. My Word


7. Dominion: Intrigue

The big winner for me was by far Dominion Intrigue. There are only two games that I have rated a 10 out of 10, and Dominion Intrigue is one of them. The action cards are A LOT more interactive than in the original, and some are just downright mean.

The Torturer for example forces all players to immediately discard two cards or gain a curse card, and there are many others that do equally nasty things. The interaction forces you to change your strategy on the fly. If you see someone taking an attack card, you should probably buy some secret chamber cards to counter and it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to load up on a few attack cards as well.

One of the fun parts of this game is trying to find the perfect balance between kingdom cards and treasure cards. You have to have treasure cards, especially gold and silver, if you are going to buy any provinces/duchies, but you need action cards to help you get more gold in order to buy the provinces/duchies. I'm still trying to master that balance, and it's a blast trying to figure it out.

For a full review of the game and more information than you would probably ever want to know check out www.boardgamegeek.com.

Overall the convention was a success. This might even be something we do every year, if I'm extra nice to Alicia that is. :)

Game Night

So we picked up some pizzas and invited Matt (Alicia's brother) over for some games. The night started out with a rousing game of Carcassonne (Matt's choice). We pulled out the Big Box and Matt chose the Princess and the Dragon and the Tower expansion. We knew it was going to be big game, so we pulled the table apart, put the leaf in and got going. It was probably the meanest game of Carcassonne that I have ever played. Without going into too many of the rules the two expansions allow you to take other player pieces hostage or the dragon can eat them and they go back to your supply. There's also a way to kick someone's piece off of a road or castle using the princess. I think the cruelty was spread pretty evenly throughout all of us, but that depends on who you ask. Alicia got kicked of a farm 4 or 5 times and she wasn't too happy about that. :) Matt ending up coming from behind thank's to sneaking onto the biggest farm and finishing a large castle he affectionately called "the monstrosity". Despite the mean nature of the game it was very fun.

I chose the second game and we played Dominion. Dominion is fast becoming my favorite game. We randomly chose ten decks and we were on our way. For those of you who don't know about Dominion, it is a very large card game. There are 500 cards in the entire game, but you don't use all of them for any given game. You mix and match different decks of cards for each game, which means every game you play is different and requires a little bit of a different strategy. As the game went on I ended up getting more Province cards than Matt or Alicia which ended up being the difference in the end. I won this one pretty easily, which definately isn't always the case.

Game number 3 for the night was Citadels. This is another card game and I've been wanting to play it again for awhile, but it never seems to make it to the table. Matt suggesting playing it, so we brought it out. Citadels is one of those games that Matt seems to do well at. Both times we've played it with him he's won easily. I was unsuccessful twice trying to steal money which set me back a little and I wasn't able to recover. I guess that's a lesson for me that I shouldn't try and steal huh? Well I didn't learn my lesson and ended up stealing some of Matt's card using the Magician. That worked out pretty well, but didn't slow him down much. Overall it was a very fun game. We'll have to get it out more.

The last game of the night was Can't Stop. This is one of our favorite shorter games and it seems like we have a blast every time we play. I learned the reason the game is called Can't Stop early on and as a result I was playing catch up for the rest of the game. I had my white cones on 6, 7, and 8. Since these numbers have the highest probability of being rolled I had determined in my mind that I wasn't going to stop rolling until one of them reached the top. I had my 8 two from the top of it's row and I died! I guess that's what you get for being greedy. Alicia played a great game and won.

Overall it was a great game night. We played great games, the kids had fun playing with each other, and even the dog was well behaved. :)

Here I go...

So I'm going to give blogging a try. The main focus of the blog is going to be game related, and more specifically board game/card games. I might throw in some video game stuff every once in awhile because who doesn't like a good video game. :) So here goes my venture into the blogging world...