After missing last week in caring for my wife and daughter, who were afflicted by a terrible stomach illness, I was thankfully able to return to game night on Tuesday evening.  We had a pretty good group, with 9-12 people looking to play boardgames at various times throughout the night.  And, more specifically, I had the chance to form or re-evaluate my initial impressions about a few different games.  

Since it was such a big hit before, I brought my copy of Sorry! Sliders again this week, which I left out and available for anyone to use for most of the evening.  After playing the "standard" way a time or two, I set it up in my favorite configuration (all four sliding boards hooked together) for the rest of the time.  It saw a lot of play (I was in 3 or 4 sessions myself), and everybody continues to have a great time with it.  I think that I'd like to pick up a second copy, however, so that I could have more variety in setup, particularly with 4 players.

I had the chance to play our Game of the Month!, Ghost Stories, with 3 new players a little later in the evening.  They picked up on the basic gist of the game pretty quickly, and I helped them get a hold on strategy (as gently as possible to not be a domineering poop-head) as the game went on.  Unfortunately, this turned out to be one of the most brutal plays of Ghost Stories that I've ever witnessed (which is saying a lot considering how brutal it is on a regular basis).  By the time we were halfway through the deck, all four boards were full of ghosts and there was at least one haunter on each.  We lost because of player death, which is a bit rare in my experience.  Even with an experienced group, I have a feeling that it would have played out pretty much the same, but the good thing is that they all apparently enjoyed their butt-kickin' and would like to give the game another shot sometime.  Personally, I've made up my mind about Ghost Stories, and my thoughts about it are mostly positive.  Yeah, it can be ridiculously frustrating at times, but the level of puzzle solving and tactical planning available with all the interaction between player and village powers is enough to keep me interested no matter what the end result of the game turns out to be.  Plus, regularly getting smacked around makes it seem an even greater accomplishment when you're actually able to pull off a victory against the vile, undead Wu Feng.


The one thing that I sorta regret from this week is that Mark brought along his copy of the newly re-released Chinatown, and unfortunately, I didn't get into it either time it was played.  Both groups seemed to have fun with it, and I sincerely hope that I can get in on some of that action ASAP!  But maybe some of those that did play can give some of their impressions...

Anyway, in talking about games that I actually did get to play, I managed to sit in on two games for the first time ever this week.  First was Chicago Express, which I picked up a few weeks ago.  I had been waffling between whether I should get it or Martin Wallace's Steel Driver, but considering that it would take some effort to order Steel Driver and I saw Chicago Express sitting on the shelf at a local game store, my decision became a lot easier.  Despite reading through the rules several times, my brain had some sort of catastrophic failure when explaining them to the group, and I felt like I was making no sense at all.  Despite that, the game is straight-forward enough that we were playing smoothly after just a round or two.  Unfortunately for me, however, my "brain issues" were significant enough that I was unable to form any coherent strategy and finished 5th out of 6 players.  Chip took the game handily with $68, and did so in holding one share of 3 different companies.  Again, everybody was pleased with the game, and I'm thinking that it will be pretty easy to get the table with some regularity over the next little while.  While I'm still not sure about what kind of strategy I'd like to pursue next, I'm very interested in gaining some more experience with the game.  Based on this first play, doing well in the game seems to depend a lot on being diversified and having good timing, but there's certainly a learning curve in how to play, and I may just be talking out of my butt.

The other "new to me" game this week was Can't Stop, the classic Sid Sackson push-your-luck dice game.  Based on its reputation, I've almost bought it on several occasions, but ultimately decided to try it first.  The game's very simple to learn, and since it's based on the probability of rolling numbers on two pairs of dice, you can pick up really quickly on how big of a risk you're taking with each roll.  After two plays (one of which I managed to win), I'd have to say that I had a pretty good time.  I'd definitely play this most any time that someone suggested it as a filler, but I don't think that I care enough about it to take the initiative to suggest it myself or to actually buy it.

The last game that we played this week was Stone Age, which was only my second experience with the game.  In my first game, Mark blew me away based on a totally abusive collection of the civilization cards (which I knew were powerful, but not necessarily that powerful).  My first impression was therefore rater positive, but I was afraid that it the game would suffer from a Saint-Petersburg-like issue where one aspect of the game (aristocrats in StP and civ cards in SA) were so powerful that it almost invalidated pursuing any other strategy.  But that was also just in a two-player game, and I didn't really know what I was doing, so I had some high hopes for our 4-player game this week.

Unfortunately, I was really tired by this point in the evening (due to getting up extra early that morning to teach a class at my hospital's extended care facility), and was still suffering from my catastrophic brain failure that occurred during Chicago Express.  I knew that I wanted to focus on getting my population up a little, my food production/farming track pretty high (so I wouldn't have to keep hunting for food), and then work hard to pick up those incredibly powerful civ cards.  But as the game progressed, I again felt like I just wasn't able to formulate any coherent strategy.  In my attempt to pick up some cards (heck, any cards) in the early game, I found myself holding a few tool multipliers and therefore tried to crank up my tool production, but felt all game like someone else was jumping into that spot just before I was able to.  Since I had picked up another worker or two, I did feel pretty good about picking up a few worker-multiplier cards later on, but only managed to pick up cards with three of the different civilization symbols.  And overall, I felt like I was screwing around blindly while all the other players were pursuing elaborate strategies with skill and precision, cutting me out of what I needed most at every turn.  It was therefore quite a surprise when, after final score tallying, I ended up with the most freaking victory points!  Apparently, I wasn't alone in feeling like my strategy was being screwed over by everybody else.  Several of the other players talked about how they couldn't get the cards they wanted either, and the overall competition to pick them up apparently mitigated their brokenness quite a bit.  

Having felt like I was clueless (strategically, that is) throughout most of the game, I don't know that winning made me feel good about the overall strength and depth of Stone Age.  Obviously, I was doing at least as well as the other players at getting what I needed, so perhaps the bigger impact of my relative inexperience with the game was that I just couldn't predict or gague how well I was doing in relation to the other players.  Right afterwards, I was almost disgusted with winning (which is, I know, a bit strange), but the more I've thought about it and how the game went down, the better I'm feeling about my "strategy" and how viable it was.  It's also occurring to me that "strategy" in general is not as important in this game than is flexible, tactical play.  Yeah, I think that it will be nice to generally know which things you want to focus on most, but marrying yourself to a particular path too early is probably going to spell certain doom in most cases.  So, after all that, I'm finding myself again intrigued by the Stone Age, and I hope that I can get a few more chances to work out my feelings about it pretty soon.  Maybe even as a Game of the Month!, but we'll have to see about that...