Well, I don't really mean playing games against the baby, but just trying to find time and opportunity to actually get in a little gaming with the wonderful, yet extremely needy and dependent, little Sweetheart in my life.  Thankfully, I am blessed with a fantastic wife who also enjoys playing games from time to time, so things went maybe even better than I thought.  Since I've not had much time to update this blog recently, here's my attempt to recap the activities of the last couple of months and give you my thoughts on what all I've played.

In all, I've had 38 plays of 18 different games in the 7 weeks of my daughter's life.  Like I said, that number surprises me a lot.  Of course, virtually none of it happened in the first 2-3 weeks, but things have picked up nicely since Gwen has been all healed up from her C-Section.  So, here I go...

Pandemic

It should be no surprise to my "readers", but I really love this game.  What is a huge surprise to even me, however, is that it seems to be my wife's favorite game right now as well.  We tend to play at least 2-3 games at a sitting, and I've racked up 10 total plays in this time period.  Six of them were with Gwen, but a couple were with my brother when he was in town and the other two were at game night.  It's intense, entertaining, and downright addictive, and I would say that it's currently my second-favorite game of all time.  

And during this time, I also had some contact with Matt Leacock, the game's designer.  He contacted me through BGG to ask permission to use one of my images (the one over there —> ) in his recent talk at Google.  I was honored... and quite enjoyed his presentation as well.       

Anyway, Pandemic may be the perfect cooperative game.  I don't want to talk too much now about it, because I've been "writing" a review for the last 3 months that I'll eventually post here as well.  I'll leave it at the fact that I think it's absolutely brilliant, and that I'd play it any time I can.


If you can believe it, we actually won that game! 
The Settlers of Catan Card Game

Gwen is a huge Settlers fan, and I had heard some good things about how the card game was a nice alternative for 2 players.  Even though we were a little surprised by how long it takes to play (~90 minutes), Gwen and I still enjoyed playing this three different times.  I picked up the expansions along the way, and we tried out the Barbarians & Traders with our last game, which added a nice element to the core game. 

In comparison to the core Settlers of Catan game, the card game feels like something entirely different.  There still is a spatial element to the game, but you totally lose the competition for location and maneuvering that you had with the map.  Trading is still included, but with just two players and having a more limited number of resources available (only three on each region), it is notably less important.

Making up for these losses, however, the card game introduces, obviously, a hand-management component.  Along with this goes an interesting memory mechanic because the expansion cards are divided into 5 or 6 piles that you can, at times, look through and/or draw from.  The large number and variety of cards adds in a lot of new and different flavor to the game, and makes it overall quite a bit more complex than regular Settlers.  In general, these are all good things that make for a nice experience if you want a little more in your Catan.  With all the expansions and nearly infinite card combinations, I expect this to be a "go to" game for us in the future.


1960: The Making of the President

Another surprise from my wife was that she really got into 1960 when I introduced it to her around Christmas.  With all our time at home, we finally had another couple of chances to pull this out.  Thankfully, the cats left the game alone on the occasions when we had to get up and take care of the baby.  Unfortunately, even card sleeves were not enough to totally protect my Endorsement cards from a wave of spilled water when I bumped the table too hard one time (be warned - they look like really nice quality, but they almost disintegrate when wet).  

I really like this game, and I was apparently a little too cocky in the first of these two plays.  I was ahead in endorsements and momentum, so I decided to concentrate more on board position in the last 2-3 rounds.  Apparently, I backed off the issues a little too soon, and Gwen managed to rack up whole regions at a time with endorsements and by cancelling all my cubes (that's the game these pictures are from).  I got my revenge in the second game, however, and we're still waiting to find time for a tie-breaker.


Qwirkle

We had played Qwirkle a couple of times at Christmas with my brother, but had been unable to find a copy locally.  Finally, Gwen gave me permission to buy it online, which was a little like giving a monkey a cupcake.  Before long, my first real online game shipment ever arrived at the house:


As you can see, all of the games are either 2-player-only or are at least very good with just two, because I was looking for games that Gwen and I could enjoy together.  Also note that I am still a rabid supporter of my FLGS, and that every one of these games were ones that they were not able to get in or that I had never seen there.

Anyway, since Qwirkle was the whole reason for the purchase, we managed to get it to the table 3 times over the last couple of weeks as well.  The game is so simple and intuitive that it's hard to believe no one came up with before now.  It strikes a really nice balance between advanced planning, skillful tile play, and game-leveling luck, and it seems to accesible to pretty much anyone.  If I have any complaints about it, it would be that it can run a little long at time... but then again that may be more because of the baby we had to continually get up and take care of.


Key Harvest

While I'm talking about games from that big shipment, let me touch on Key Harvest as well.  I had heard a lot about this game in the Essen coverage from last year, and even though I've never played any of the other "Key" games, it sounded really interesting to me.  Anyway, during the first BoardGame Night that Gwen, Samantha, and I attended, I managed to get Chris Ingersoll and Mark to join me and give it a try.  I was a little distracted by the baby, but overall I was still pretty impressed by the game.  Key Harvest is a bit dry and very thinky, but the auction-like mechanic of setting aside tiles that either you or other players can buy on later turns really makes for some cool decisions.  I certainly want to give this another few plays before forming my final opinion of it, but things look good so far!


Medici vs Strozzi

Gwen and I managed to give this one try so far, and overall I'd say it's pretty interesting.  To me, it feels sort of like a cross between Zooloretto (for the tile draw/placement aspect) and Modern Art (for the auctions that you really have no idea how to value until, I assume, you've played it a few times).  I assume (I hope, anyway) that it would also remind me of Medici, if I had ever played that, that is. 
 
It's pretty neat, though, that the auction mechanic in this game is very similar to that used in Key Harvest above.  This one is a little more brutal, however, because you are forced to pay the price you set, while in Key Harvest you could conceivably leave a tile on your store forever if no one wanted to buy it.  Anyway, overall we weren't too crazy about this one, but I think it's more because in these wide-open auction games it's really hard to get an idea about a reasonable economy until you've played a few times.  And, as I've heard from several podcasters and reviewers, it's really weird that you end up with less money than you started (in our game, I won with 200 coins/florin/whatever while Gwen had none).


Lord of the Rings

I'm a pretty big LotR fan, and when my brother Tony, a massive LotR fan, came into town, I saw the perfect opportunity to finally get the Lord of the Rings game to the table.  I picked up this game a couple of months ago when I traded away my copy of Power Grid, which I found that I didn't care for while it was Game of the Month! in February.  I've been doubly excited about LotR because it's cooperative, which is something that I've found I enjoy a heck of a lot as well (Pandemic and Shadows Over Camelot are two of my top 10 games).  Anyway, even with all of these things going for it, I was a touch disappointed with it overall.

Gwen joined Tony and me to play, and we tried out just the core game (even though I also picked up the Friends & Foes expansion).  The mechanics of the card play and advancing the tracks on each board was pretty cool, but the event tiles seemed a little odd and overly random to me.  And while it appears that Reiner Knizia worked hard to incorporate the events of the book into the game, it still failed to evoke the richness of the LotR theme for me.  Instead, I felt like I was just playing a bunch of cards with little symbols on them while looking at some pretty LotR pictures.  I still enjoyed the game and would gladly play it again, but I guess I had just expected so much both from gameplay and especially from the theme that it couldn't live up to.  We died, of course, but we did at least make it to Mordor before handing the One Ring over to Sauron.  

I guess that's enough for now.  I didn't talk about every single game that I've played in this period, but you can read more if you want by checking out the Hypermind BoardGamers' geeklists for April and May to see some more comments both from me and Chris Ingersoll.  It's good to be "back", and I will hopefully find more time now to keep posting here as I'd like to!


Gwen and Samantha at Game Night on May 6.