Over the weekend, Gwen and I actually had houseguests stay overnight with us on Saturday. Her brother Kevin and his fiancé Chipper were planning to stay with their mother, but she unfortunately came down with a nasty stomach bug on Friday night. It was really nice to have them over, especially since we got to introduce them to a couple of our favorite “couples” games during their stay. Now they both have at least a little experience with more modern boardgames, with stuff like Blokus, Cartagena, and even Taluva. Plus, they are both quite bright and interested in gaming, so I’m hoping that they can be even more regular gaming partners for Gwen and me despite their living in Raleigh.

But anyway, we started off, of course, with Pandemic. Kevin and Chipper had never played a cooperative game before, but they were intrigued both by the coop idea and the theme. For our first game, I removed the Operations Expert role but started us off at the normal difficulty level (5 Epidemic cards). Kevin had the Scientist, Chipper was the Medic, Gwen was the Dispatcher, and I was the Researcher.

The game itself went really well. We cured and eradicated both yellow and blue, which pretty much removed the threat of losing by either outbreaks or running out of disease cubes. But we had focused so much on questionably unnecessary eradications that we were running short on cards to actually cure the other two diseases. We cut it really close, curing the last disease with no cards left in the player stack (i.e. the last possible turn of the game!).

I added in the Ops Expert for our second game, but the initial disease placement pretty much doomed us (there were two red 3-cube cities right next each other), and on top of that, we had a first-turn epidemic that caused two outbreaks. We played it out, though, and managed to cure two diseases (even without the Scientist in the game) before losing on a turn to both outbreaks and running out of red cubes.

Kevin picked up on Pandemic right away, and while Chipper stumbled over some of the more complicated interactions and strategic planning, they both did really well for their first play. In fact, Kevin made a not-so-subtle hint that he wouldn’t mind getting his own copy for Christmas. So I’d definitely say that it was a big success!

It was pretty late at that point, but we really wanted to teach them 10 Days in the USA as well (since we had given it to them for Christmas and they still hadn’t gotten around to playing it). All the “10 Days…” games are pretty simple, so we ran through the rules and played pretty quickly. It’s been a while since I’ve played one of these games with 4 players, and I’d forgotten how different the play feels with more than just two of us. But anyway, Chipper managed to complete her trip first, and then we headed off to bed.

So we had a great time with Kevin and Chipper, but that wasn’t the only exciting thing that happened this week. I haven’t talked about it much (if any) here, but we’ve been in the process of having a "bonus room" finished out over the last several weeks. Of course, it’s going to be my (okay, our) Game Room, and I can’t wait to get into it. It’s almost finished (we’re really just waiting for our builder to deem it complete), and then we’ll be ready to move all the games in. Below you can see some pictures of what it looks like!