Our gaming this weekend started on Saturday night with a trio of plays for Gwen's new "hottest" game, If Wishes Were Fishes.  In our first three games, she had beaten me pretty bad, but this session I started to "get" how to play.  I won the first two, making Gwen a little mad in the process, but then she destroyed me by something like 60 bucks in the third game to resume her dominance over the game.

The more I play this, the more that I like it.  Frankly, I think that it's way underrated at BoardGameGeek, because there's a heck of a lot going on in this game.  You've got a neat little card-drafting/-drawing mechanic that involves the spending of the worms to get the more recently-revealed cards, tough decisions about whether to use cards for their special power ("wishes") or for their VP value ("selling" them), market manipulation (the "buyers"), and even area-control scoring.  There are multiple paths to victory and several different strategies that you can try out.  Plus, the end result is still easy enough for pretty much anyone to understand.  If this had a more popular designer and a Renaissance Italy theme, it'd be in the BGG top 100! 

While the art design of the game is pretty neat and quirky, I also think that it's one of the biggest things holding it back in the minds of gamers.  It looks like a children's game, and therefore I think that many people don't take it as seriously as they should.  Regardless, it will be a staple in our regular gaming from now on.

Gwen and I also tried out the "new" Catan Dice Game.  I've played it a few times on the Play Catan website, and it's pretty much the same in person.  It is, of course, just a Yahtzee variant using the resources from the Catan series and a neat little score sheet that introduces a bit of a spatial progression element to the game.  Overall, it's still a total luckfest, but not a totally unpleasant one, and it's probably best used as a quick solo game when you're in a mood to sorta play a game or just want to roll a lot of dice (like when I played a whole solo game while waiting for our take-out at the Olive Garden last week!).

On Sunday, Ian Sergeant, one of my friends from the early days of the Hypermind BoardGamers, dropped by to borrow a few games for a gathering he's having this week.  His new work schdule keeps him from joining us on Tuesday nights, but he still manages to find time to play a few games with family and friends.  Anyway, with a free afternoon and a few gamers gathered together, there you will also haver game-playing.  Ian had never had the opportunity to play Pandemic (which we considered a terrible shame), so we pulled it out and taught him how to play.

In our first game, something happened that I had never seen before.  Our roles were the Medic (Ian), the Dispatcher (Gwen), and the Scientist (Me), and we were playing a standard (5 epidemic) game.  Pretty early, after I had cured a disease or two, Gwen and Ian worked together using some Dispatcher-Medic manipulation shenanigans to eradicate disease after disease.  By the end of the game, we had completely cleared the board of every single disease cube, and finished with all four dieases not only cured, but also completely eradicated!  We had experienced only one outbreak, and the only real "threat" was that we were about 2/3 through the player deck.      


With this game known for its brutality, we were afraid that Ian would walk away thinking it too easy, so we re-set and played again.  The second game was a lot closer, but we still proved victorious.  I know that card draw in both decks makes a heck of a lot of difference in how difficult the games can be, but I also think that my (and Gwen's) experience is starting to really make the game a lot easier.  I've played over 40 games now (many of them 2-player games with Gwen), and it's pretty rare that we lose these days (even in "heroic" games).  That being said, the game still always feels challenging (with a few, rare exceptions, like this one) and fun.  Plus, we often in play in 15-25 minutes.

To finish off the day, I pulled out another new "birthday" game, the Ticket to Ride Card Game.  All three of us were very familiar with regular TtR, but Ian and Gwen had a bit of a time getting their heads around the memory mechanic in the game.  In the end, however, they apparently had it better than I did, since they both beat me.  As far as liking it goes, feelings were mixed.  We don't play a lot of memory games, and it's so different from regular Ticket to Ride that they just didn't know what to think of it.    

Speaking ot that, I don't know which came first: the idea to do a TtR card game or the "On-the-track-stack" memory mechanic, but in either case Alan Moon did a good job in creating a game that still captures the same theme as regular TtR while also feeling like a very different play experience. I'm also, however, still not sure exactly how pleasant this experience actually is.

I've played it twice now, and I still haven't figured out a good system for tracking which cards I still need to collect. The game also suffers from a limited play number, because while it can technically play up to 4, the game becomes longer when that 4th player is added (and which case I and most people could and probably would just play base Ticket to Ride in the same time). Overall, I haven't made my mind up about it, but I will hopefully be able to get in a few more plays soon to figure it out.

As always, good gaming = good weekend.  I hope to have many more good weekends ahead!

 
Samantha grows concerned over the fate of the world as we play Pandemic.