So, after missing two straight weeks of game night because of illness in my family, I was thankfully able to make it to the last couple of meetings of the month as well as having a little gaming time with my brother and his sons over the weekend. 

Oddly enough, I was only able to play March's Game of the Month!, Thebes, once during the entire month.  I played it the first week, missed the next two, and then in these last two weeks, people played it first thing in the evening before I managed to get there.  So while I have some previous experience with the game, I kinda feel like it was a bust (for me, anyway) as GotM!  I don't have any better understanding of it and my overall impression of it hasn't changed a bit.  That sucks, and I probably won't bother writing a GotM! review about it, but at least I got to play some other games that probably excite me quite a bit more.

Once such game is Metropolys.  I've mentioned it once before, and in its second play it went over just as well or maybe even better.  Despite being a bit closer than last time, I was able to pull out my second win through achieving my secret goal three times, picking up the Metro card with four tokens, and claiming 3 or 4 of my preferred neighborhoods (totalling 42 points).  The game-play is ridiculosly simple; you're just making a series of bids to claim neighborhoods.  However, there are all sorts of factors (such as location of tokens, your preferred neighborhood and secret objective, the board layout, possible paths or bottlenecks from previous buildings, the possibility of taking the tallest building in a district, etc.) involved in making your decision and determining the value of the next locations keep you engaged and thinking the whole time.

But that being said, there are two things that make Metropolys really exciting.  First is the totally unique auction system that involves the spatial element of actually placing out buildings into empty neighborhoods.  While only the last (highest-number) building placed will actually be constructed (remain on the board after the auction), the fact that you can use a building not only to increase the bid but also to change the direction in which the bid moves across the board is just so freaking cool. 

The other thing that I really like is how the game accelerates towards its end.  Many games start quickly because the choices you make aren't as important in the early game, but then slow near the endgame as players agonize about what move to make.  But in Metropolys, it's almost reversed.  Early on, everything's wide open and there are tons of options for how you want to plan your strategy.  But as the end nears, we again we see the impact of the spatial facet of the game, becasue as the board fills up, your options for play diminish while the choices you make get more important, thus preventing the possibility of much analysis paralysis. 

Metropolys really encourages long-term planning as well as giving the opportunity for cagey tactical play.  Right now, I'd have to say that it's my second-favorite auction/bidding game for all time, falling in just behind Ra.  Heck, I'm getting excited about the game just writing about it!

I also got in my first play of Age of Empires: III last week.  I had heard lots of good stuff about it when it was released a year or two ago, and finally picked it up during the Barnes & Noble discount sale not too long ago.  Sort of parallel to that, Britt picked the game up and introduced to some of our group on a Saturday game session a little while ago.  Anyway, we finally got it to the table during our normal Tuesday game night, and it went pretty well also. 

Having never played the game, I decided to try out a trade goods/money engine strategy.  Unfortunately, I didn't recognize that trade goods weren't really the best way to get money in the game (which would probably be sending merchants to the colonies), and the effort I put into collecting the goods really hampered me in discovery (even though losing an expedition to India's natives hurt a little there, too) and in colonizing the new world.  I did manage to pick up the Mercantilism tile in the last few rounds to edge out Chip in our competition to not be last, but I was still no where near the leaders.

Despite being a 2-hour game, we decided to make AoE:III our Game of the Month! for April.  The game is certainly deep enough to give us lots of strategies to explore throughout the month, and I hope that its "fun factor" will keep us interested enough so that edicating half or so of our gaming time each week seems to be a good thing.

The other game that I played for the first time last week was my often-missed filler, Lord of the Fries.  All in all, it was a lot of fun.  There's a lot of randomness in the game, but heck, it's a silly card game and that's what it's supposed to have!  Your choices have just enough impact on the game to keep you interested when the comedy of the theme wears thin.  But the only detractor I see right now is that it goes on just a bit too long for what it is.  Our game (with 5 players) lasted 45 minutes, and even though I won, I think it'd be markedly better at 30 minutes.

So that takes me to this weekend and the games I played with Tony and his boys Alex and Ben.  Playing with kids is always an interesting experience.   You certainly must have a different motivation for playing with them than with other adults, but you also get exposed to a whole different set of games as well (which can help the old "new to me" stats).  I think that the first game I'll mention is the Marvel Trivia Game, a comicbook-themed trivia game of the Marvel universe.  Tony (who has collected comics since he was 9 or so) was on a team with Alex (who couldn't care less about comics) while I (who collected comicbooks for 4 or 5 years in high school and college) and Ben (who is crazy into superheroes, but is only 6 years old) were on the other team.  Through a startling series of events (mainly composed of us getting really easy questions and Tony not getting the questions he needed to win), Ben (carrying his mostly-clueless uncle along for the ride) won us the game. 

We also played The Disneyland Game.  Yay.  It's a roll-and-move game where you move around Disneyland collecting cards from the different Attractions and taking pictures.   It's totally random and pointless, but there were two little mechanics that were at least noteworthy.  The first is that the game has a variable length based on a clock that tracks the hours the park is open (9am to p 9pm), which is advanced an hour each time someone lands on a clock space.  Yeah, it's more randomosity, but the clock was a nice addition.  The other thing is that there is also a "wishing" space where you get to try and steal a card from another player.  You choose the player, and they take two plastic stars (one yellow and one blue) into their hands, and you have to pick the hand with the yellow star to take one of their cards.  This at least introduces a real choice into the game, and possibly sets up for some second-guessing action.  Still, Tony and I did our best to push the action to end the game, and I wouldn't really recommend picking this up at the thrift store should you encounter it.

On the other hand, I brough along with me Gamewright's Castle Keep, which is a much better balance of choice and randomness and can appeal to both children and adults.  Alex won the first game in no time, but then our second play lasted much longer with lots of attacks on each other to pull back anyone that got ahead.  In the end, Ben managed to pull what he needed to win before we could knock him down.  And that brings up another great thing about this (and other good children's games) - you don't have to "take it easy" when playing with Castle Keep with kids.  The luck of the tile draw does all the equalizing that's needed, so you can feel free to use all the tactical thought you want in placing them.



The other game I played with Alex was the Lord of the RIngs Trading Card Game.  Tony does this a lot with his boys; takes a dead CCG and buys up some cheap boosters and starters to make a pool of decks that they can play as a non-collectible game (of course, he also buys extra packs to use as an allowance or reward for the kids to keep them motivated to behave).  This is the LotR CCG based on the movies rather than the more classic Middle-Earth CCG based on the books.  Anyway, you basically try to advance Frodo and the ring through 9 locations to Mt. Doom, overcoming obstacles thrown at you by your opponent while doing your best to trip them up in the process.  It was pretty good overall, but without the deck-building aspect, I lose a lot of the fun that I usually have with CCG's.  It might be a nice investment for you, however, if you're a fan of the Lord of the Rings and want to do something similar to what Tony does.

To finish the evening, Tony and I finally got a little bit of a chance to play alone.  I had brought along a few games, but with it getting late, most of them were out of the question.  In the end, we actually played a handful of games of Magic: TheGathering.  After Chris Ingersoll told me about the premise of the Shards of Alara set (where magic is shattered into its five colors, and you can never have access to more than three associated colors at a time), I ended up picking up all five theme decks to, once again, have what amounts to a relatively balanced set of non-collectible decks to play should I feel the Magic itch.  Anyway, with the "tweaks" I made to the decks, they were apparently not so well-balanced after all, and Tony wiped the floor with me.  I had a lot of fun, and it reminded me of the months and months back in the early days of Magic when he and I played almost continually with the two starters and a handful of boosters (for ante, of course, since that's what the rules told us to do).  Magic is such a fantastic game, but it's just too much of a money and time sink for me to stay involved in (2 occurrences of the addiction is enough for me to learn my lesson).

Well, I've still got more to write to get caught up, but I'll split this up and put out part two tomorrow, so come back then for more!