Family Game Night
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Boardgames – Over the weekend I brought back our regular family game day. This time around in an effort to reduce arguments about what we should play I came up with a system. To start each family member writes their name on two slips of paper and puts them in a hat (or any other vessel). The person whose name is drawn throws out their slip and gets to pick the game. The winner of that game puts an additional slip of paper with their name into the hat. My hope is that by using this system we'll be able to play more games and and improve the variety of the games we do play.
This week my daughter won the first pick, so we played Master Detective Clue. This was the shortest game of Clue I've ever played, as my wife got lucky with her first guess and solved it after only 3 turns. Because the game was so short we decided to draw again to play another game.
This time around my wife won the draw and spent a while at the shelves. Eventually she came back with a game called Titanic. I didn't even know we owned this game and was surprised to see that the components were still in the original sealed baggies. Looking it over I wasn't thrilled with the components and the idea of a game based on Titanic from 1998, made me cringe.
I was however pleasantly surprised, the game has some interesting mechanics. The beginning of the game forces players to run around collecting their belongings before they can move on to the next area of the board. It's somewhat frustrating as you have to have an exact die roll to enter any of the areas where you can purchase your items (passport, room key, life vest, health card, and belongings). If a player lands on the same space as another player they have to give up a gossip card (similar to Chance cards in Monopoly) and if one player has a health card and the other doesn't they get infected and lose the card. I liked the attempt at simulating passengers bustling about on the lower decks.
Once you've collected all your stuff you move on to first class. This part of the game is a bit of a depature as it plays just like Life from this point on. Roll the dice, move do what the space says, repeat. Interestingly their are plenty of spaces that force you back to the begining unless you have a bellhop token (basically a get out of jail card). Eventually you make it to the lifeboats and win the game.
While it wasn't ground breaking or super innovative the game was fun to play. It probably helped that the trailers for Titanic 3D started over the weekend. As the 100 year anniversary of the tragedy is next month.
