March 2011
4 posts
5 tags
Gloom
Game: Gloom with 4 players Play: You have a family of 5 (cards) down in front of you and your goal is to make them die as miserably as possible. The cards are transparent, so stacking cards from your hand on top of the family cards changes various attributes (cards like Chased by Children, Contracted Consumption, Pursued by Poodles). An Untimely Death card kills them, but can be removed by some...
3 tags
Dice games for a passel of people →
johnkaufeld:
Phase 10 Dice does a good job of turning the Phase 10 card game into a relatively fast dice game, but it can still be a bit long, especially with a lot of players.
If you need to entertain a large group, and want to keep the learning curve low with the game speed high, I can recommend these for you as well. Give ‘em a go!
Bowling Dice (Fundex) — Anyone who ever bowled can make...
4 tags
Phase 10 Dice
Game: Phase 10 Dice with 7 players Play: Roll ten dice up to three times to try and get the required sets and/or runs for each phase. You must complete each phase in order, so if you don’t get it, try again next turn. The phases include things like two sets of three of a kind, a set of four and a run of four, a run of 7, etc. Your score is the sum of the numbers used. Unused dice and wilds...
3 tags
Starship Catan
Game: Starship Catan, 2-player game Play: Visit planets, fight pirates, collect resources, improve your starship’s engines and cannons, and build Colony and Trade planets. There is a die rolled in order to fly through one of four planet decks of cards (in conjunction with your engines) and a die used to fight pirates as they come up (in conjunction with your cannons). The flight die can...
January 2011
2 posts
2 tags
7 Wonders
Game: 7 Wonders with 5 players Play: 7 Wonders is played over 3 ages. In each age, you’re dealt a hand of 7 cards. Choose one to keep and pass the rest to your neighbor (clockwise the first and third ages, counter-clockwise the second age). Everyone reveals their card (or sells it for gold or uses it to build their monument), makes any necessary payments and collects any applicable rewards,...
2 tags
Defenders of the Realm
Game: Defenders of the Realm with 4 players Play: Each player is a character with certain abilities that help with the fight against the four monster Generals and their minions (minions!). Each General has a number of hit points, and certain abilities that you have to take into account when attacking it and penalties if you lose. Darkness Spreads cards (drawn at the end of each turn) cause minions...
November 2010
1 post
1 tag
Felinia
Game: Felinia with 4 players Play: Purchase goods in the market, use the goods to board ships in the harbor, sail the ships to the neighboring island, and exchange the goods for tokens that give you points. Art: It was pretty, but sometimes that’s not enough. There are definite problems with this game’s design - orange goods blend in with the market background; the colors on the...
October 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Small World
Game: Small World with Tales & Legends expansion and 5 players Play: Choose a race/special ability combination from the visible cards, then use it to conquer regions on the map, which often involves defeating other players’ races (and what’s not fun about that?). At the end of your turn, you get coins (points) for every region you occupy, sometimes with additional bonuses because...
2 tags
Dungeon Lords
Game: Dungeon Lords with 4 players Play: Prepare your dungeon for the oncoming adventurers by digging tunnels and rooms, acquiring monsters, and setting traps. Make sure you don’t get too evil, or the Paladin will come! Art: Love it. Love it! It is gorgeous and hilarious. There is an evilometer with a fangy smiley face to track when your evilness raises and lowers. There are little plastic...
September 2010
6 posts
2 tags
Game: Android with 5 players Play: Arkham Horror-type game with a Blade Runner-type theme. Beyond that, too complicated to even begin to describe. Art: Fantastic. The board was gorgeous, the bits were gorgeous (and plentiful - oh, were they plentiful!), the cards were gorgeous. Conclusion: There were things I really liked, such as the mechanic for moving around the board and the way we had to...
1 tag
Game: Back to the Future: The Card Game with 3 players (themed Chrononauts) Play: A series of event cards are set out on the table. Use action cards in your hand to change and fix events in history (in this case, in history of the Back to the Future trilogy) to fit with your ID’s requirements. Game ends when time-travel is uninvented. Art: Black-and-white (or red-and-white, etc) icons, bold...
1 tag
Game: Dixit with 3 players Play: It’s a storytelling game with shades of Baulderdash and Apples to Apples. Each player has a hand of cards with paintings on them and on your turn, you say a sentence about a card (variations include singing, etc). Each player then picks two cards that fits that sentence (one card, with more players) and you shuffle your card and their cards and lay them down...
2 tags
Game: Innovation, played with 3 and 4 players Play: You’re trying to build your civilization up from Prehistory (age 1) to Information (age 10). You draw cards, play cards in your hand down in front of you, and then activate the “dogma” actions on those cards to cause other effects, such as drawing more cards, taking cards from other players’ tableaus, etc. Art: Straight...
4 tags
Game: Ad Astra (To The Stars), played with 3, 4, and 5 players. Play: Settlers of Cataan meets Race for the Galaxy. There are two main areas of play: the board, on which action cards are placed and where the score is kept; and the starfield, where stars and planets are set up for players to land ships and build colonies, factories, and terraforming globes. A medium to large table is necessary for...
2 tags
Bohnanza
Game: Bohnanza with 5 players (battle of the bean farmers) Play: Trade, plant, and harvest various kinds of beans, and by various I mean various, ranging from the homely green bean and the exotic chili bean to the unusual blue bean and the unimaginable stink bean. Art: Funny cartoons that are fairly easily distinguishable by both color and shape, which is useful when playing at a larger table....
August 2010
3 posts
4 tags
Game: Thurn and Taxis with 4 players Play: Thurn and Taxis is one of those games with a ridiculous-sounding premise that turns out to be a lot of fun. And what is that premise? Building post office routes in Germany. No, really! You draw city cards into your hand and then play connected cities into a route down in front of you. Once you have three or more cards in the route, you score it by...
4 tags
Game: Fluxx with 6 players Play: Draw one card, play one card. At least, that’s how you start. And you play, for example, a Keeper, which goes down in front of you; an Action, which happens immediately; or a New Rule, which changes the rules of the game: Draw 5. Hand Limit 3. Keeper Limit 4. Play All. Rules are constantly in flux (hah hah) as people play various New Rule cards. Game ends...
4 tags
10 Days in Hex
Game: 10 Days in the Americas with 4 players Play: The board is a map of North and South America. Your mission (should you choose to accept) is use cards depicting the countries and various modes of transportation to plan a 10-day trip around the map. You can drive between countries that share a border, fly between countries that are the same color, and sail between countries that are...
July 2010
6 posts
3 tags
Skallywaggs and Citadels
Game: Skallywaggs with 4 people Play: There cards with heads, torsos, and legs of pirates. You’re trying to get 5 seaworthy pirates down in front of you so you can sail off somewhere. There are also event cards that let you discard pirates, switch body parts, and do various other things. Art: Not bad. Amusing caricatures. Conclusion: I think it could possibly be a fun game. Maybe. If...
4 tags
Roll Through the Galaxy
Game: Roll Through the Ages with 4 players Play: Roll game-specific dice to gather goods to buy developments, food to feed your cities, and people to build monuments and cities, but watch out for skulls, which cause disasters. Goods and food are tracked on a small board with pegs, people and developments and everything are tracked on the score sheet. Art: Possible one of the best designed...
4 tags
An unusual set of games
An unusual set of games (for us). Game: Pictionary with 3 players Conclusion: We had an odd number of players, so we couldn’t play the correct rules of Pictionary, so we made up a few of our own. It was fun, but not something I’d want to play all the time. And it would really depend on who’s playing, like most party-style games.
Game: Citadels with 3 players Conclusion: Three...
4 tags
Cartagena
Game: Cartagena, Tortuga variation, three players Play: Move your 6 pirates down the “tunnel” by playing cards with various symbols (hat, pistol, cutlass, bottle, etc) on the spaces on the board. If a pirate is on the nearest space with the symbol, skip to the next one. And so on. Move a pirate backwards to a space occupied with 1 or 2 other pirates to draw more cards. In the...
4 tags
Topple the Galaxy Troll
Game: Cave Troll with three players. Play: Each turn has four moves, in which you can do any combination of drawing cards to place little plastic heroes and monsters into the dungeon, moving the heroes and monsters around in the dungeon, using special abilities some of the heroes and monsters have, and I think something else that I forget. Maybe use an artifact card, if you have one. You...
4 tags
Cataan Showdown
Game: Vegas Showdown with four players Play: Bid on rooms in the middle board to place on your casino board. Make money and gain points (fame or prestige, something like that) based on what attributes the rooms have. Art: Very straightforward. Utilitarian, almost to the point of being boring. However, it’s a nice change from the over-embellished games that can be hard to play because...
June 2010
7 posts
3 tags
Race for Puerto Rico
Sunday games with friends, I was late so I only had time for two games. Game: Five-player Puerto Rico. I lost. Play: Sell goods to get coins to buy buildings to get more goods to get victory points. Or something like that. It’s not difficult to play, but it is too confusing to explain in a meaningful way without all the bits and pieces to look at. Art: It works for what it is. I like...
4 tags
Bananatropolys
Game: Bananagrams with a bunch of people. Play: A bunch of Scrabble-esque letter tiles are placed face-down in the middle of the table. Everyone takes 21 tiles. Someone (doesn’t matter who) says “split” and everyone flips over their tiles and makes again Scrabble-esque interlocking words with them, trying to use all 21 tiles. When you’ve used all your tiles, say...
3 tags
Through the Alhambra
The Friday evening game group dissolved, sadly; some of us are trying to revive it on Saturday afternoons.
Game: We played Through the Desert with 4 people, which is definitely different from the 2-person game.
Play: The board filled up much more quickly, of course, and there was a lot of conflict - people blocking other people’s caravans, and also color-conflict, because you can’t...
4 tags
Through the Lost Galaxy
Monday game night was an evening of 2-player games! Good times.
Game: Race for the Galaxy, with 2 players but ignoring the 2-player rules. I’ve played with the 2-player rules before and it changes the game enough that it very frustrating and less fun. Regular rules with two players worked fine.
Play: We played three games of Race. I did miserably the first round - I made the mistake of...
1 tag
Alhambra Big Box
Game: Later on Saturday, my friend and I pulled out my Alhambra Big Box and tried a few of the expansions. Some of them worked better with two players than others. Play: The basic game involves using money cards in your hand to buy building tiles to build an Alhambra. Each player builds their own Alhambra. The building tiles are different colors, which comes into play with scoring and some of...
2 tags
Mr. Jack
Game: Saturday afternoon, a friend came to visit. We went to the local game store and wandered around looking at the pretties, then tried out a game called Mr. Jack, which won some sort of award for being the best new two-person game last year or something like that. Play: One person plays Jack the Ripper (in disguise, not on a murdering rampage) and the other person plays an inspector trying...
4 tags
Tikis Settle the Galaxy
First game was Tiki Topple (and yes, it was just as silly as it sounds). There is row of little totem guys in various colors. You have a card that says what three colors you want in the top three slots, and you get four cards that can rearrange the totems (move a totem 1, 2, or 3 spaces up; move any totem to the bottom; remove the bottom totem completely). I won by rather a lot, but not...
November 2009
2 posts
2 tags
Galaxy Dominion
Two games of Race for the Galaxy tonight, one of which I won. It really is one of my favorite games right now, though I’m not sure why - it took me ages to understand it, and I still need the reference card for some things. Especially the Consume/Trade phase, which always confused me and for a long time I just basically ignored. It didn’t help that the people who taught me the...
4 tags
10 Arcana of Ra
First was Arcana, a card game in which you use the cards in your hand to buy the cards on the table, often bidding against the other players. It has some flavors of Dominion. Not too hard to learn the game play, but strategy is trickier and it took longer than we expected for the first time around. I did not win, but I’d play again. Then we played Ra (the dice version, not the tile...
October 2009
2 posts
2 tags
Vegas Pandemic
Pandemic. We actually won Pandemic this time. I wonder if 3 is the ideal number of players? For many games it’s 4, but it seemed with Pandemic that that means things take too long to get done and bad stuff happens too quickly to deal with it. Hmm. Vegas Showdown. You bid on rooms to put in your casino board. It might be interesting, but some people are better at teaching new games than...
4 tags
Intrigue in Carcassonne
I played two games of Dominion: Intrigue. I tied the first time and lost badly the second time. I guess whether I like it or not depends on the mix of cards. Then we played Pandemic. It’s a 4-player game, but it’s also a group game; that is, we’re all working together toward a common goal. We lost…civilization collapsed as as diseases spread unchecked. Oops. Then three...
September 2009
3 posts
3 tags
Race for Metropolys
Apparently I am getting a slight reputation for being quiet and sneaky (at least, when it comes to games). A lot of people chatter during games about how they’re doing and how other people are doing and who it looks like is going to win and so on, but I tend to be more reticent on the subject. Also, there were several games in the past few months that I didn’t remember how to play...
3 tags
All Aboard!
Last night I played Ticket to Ride, which isn’t my favorite game but I kicked ass at, and Stationmaster, which I did not do so well at, but still had fun. Ticket to Ride is a board game with colored railroads all across a map, and you gather cards of the different colors in order to place your train cars on the tracks and complete routes on the route cards you draw. I think the reason I...
3 tags
Small Galaxy
Small World and Race for the Galaxy at a friend’s house this evening. Small World involves choosing a race/attribute pair from several available options, each of which has a different bonus or skill. Then you use tiles with pictures of the race to conquer regions on the board. Most of the art is nice, but some of it is pretty dire. The Elves are just very…swish. And the Amazons?...
August 2009
2 posts
4 tags
Left, Right, and Citadels
Tonight was a so-so game night. I ended up in a group that included two people who were new to the group, one of whom would have preferred to sit around and talk than to play games (than what’s the point of going to a game night?). We played Citadels, which is a fun game but took twice as long as it should have because the new person who would rather have sat and talked never did quite ...
4 tags
Dominion of Dogs and Apples
I played Apples to Apples - unusual to play such a normal game at game night - and Dog and Dominion: Intrigue. I did not win Apples, but my partner and I were so close to winning Dog and I won Dominion quite neatly.
July 2009
2 posts
3 tags
Galaxy Intrigue
I played Dominion: Intrigue again, which I’m still not convinced about. It doesn’t help that I did poorly, of course. Also played the original version of Race for the Galaxy (twice). The first time, I didn’t do so well, but the second time - the second time, the score was amazing. There were four people playing and the score was 33 - 33 - 33 - 30. The reason one player won and...
4 tags
Intriguing Dog in Pompeii
First game was the new version of Dominion, Dominion: Intrigue, which I’m not sure I like. It’s a lot more offensive (the opposite of defensive, not as in inappropriate) and I ended up losing pretty badly (me: 17 pts, one player had 19 pts, the other two had closter to 30). The three of them all had the “Torturer” card, which when played meant that the person who...