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.

Board Game Night

Saturday we had some friends over to try out some of the new games we received for Christmas. To start out the night we played Sorry Sliders. This is a really fun dexterity game that is similar to shuffleboard. The neat thing about it is the variety of boards. Each center board has it's own rules and scoring system. Mt personal favorite is the red board, "Danger Dots," if your piece touches one of the exclamation points on the board it's removed from play. Scoring is done with a separate tracker which matches up with the slider. Just like in Sorry the goal is to get your pieces to "Home" by an exact count. Everyone seemed to enjoy the game an although it's set up for 4 players you could easily create teams for larger groups.

Next up on the list is a game called Smart Ass. This one has a very simple board that tracks a players success. After answering a question correctly the player roles a 12-sided die marked with 1, 2, 3, and 4 to see how far you move. Each turn one player reads clues and the rest of the players blurt of an answer, if you answer wrong you cannot answer again. The clues are fun and this makes a fun party game. My only complaint is the board is to short and it's fairly easy for one player to quickly run away with the game. Overall fun but not the best game design.

The third game we played is Urban Myth. I had high hopes for this game as I'm a huge fan of urban legends. The gameplay is a bit confusing. Each player has a card that says truth on one side, myth on the other. One player reads a clue and the rest the the players secretly flip their card to say truth or myth. Players that get it right advance one space around the board, the reader advance one space for each player that got it wrong. That part is simple, it gets weird when it comes to scoring. If a player is on a square that matches the category of the clue and they correctly answer the question they get the card. Each card has a letter on the back and you when the game by collecting cards to spell TRUE or MYTH. While the game is fun and lets people that are terrible at trivia have a 50/50 shot of getting it right the scoring is very random and doesn't have much strategy. Fun party game that could easily benefit from some house rules or a dice to select categories. 

We wrapped up the evening with Carcassonne: The Discovery. Allegedly this is a simplified version of Carcassonne geared to younger players. I wasn't a big fan of this game as the simplification takes a lot of the fun and strategy out of the game. Each player has 5 meeples one that is used one the score board and the others are used to denote Brigands, Explorers and Privateers. The scoring for the game is slightly confusing as its based on the geography of the board rather than cities like the original. I think the combination of playing it late in the night for the first time and the oversimplified rules led to us not enjoying this game as much. We'll give it another shot, but right now I think I prefer the original.