My absence from the site over the last week or so was not merely the result of a wave of laziness and/or neglect.  Rather, I and my family (as in, Gwen, Samantha, my parents, and 5 cousins that are mostly around my parents' age) headed down to North Myrtle Beach for a week of relaxation, good food, and playing some games.  Now, the three older couples get together every week or two to play Canasta as well as occasional forays into other card games such as Five Crowns, Phase 10, Rook, and other similar stuff.  So for the most part, that's what they do at the beach as well.  I, of course, had different plans for my gaming experinces this past week...

The list of games that I toted along is quite extensive.  From memory, I think that this is what it looked like:
Ticket to Ride
Pandemic
Cold War: CIA vs KGB
For Sale
Kingdoms
If Wishes Were Fishes
10 Days in the USA
Tier auf Tier
Slide 5
Doodle Dice
Liar's Dice
Wits & Wagers
Bohnanza
Bananagrams

It was a finely-crafted list designed to provide both 2-player gaming for Gwen and me as well as some options to involve the older crowd as well.  Unfortunately, due to the demands of caring for an active 17-month old and making evenings the main time for us to hit the beach, we only had one opportunity to play anything with the greater assembly of players.  But I'll start there anyway.

The most adventurous of the older folks are my dad (Larry) and his first cousin, Brenda.  So they joined Gwen and me first in a couple of games of For Sale.  Brenda had been pretty uncomfortable a couple of years ago with the complexity of Vegas Showdown, so I thought that this light, auctioning card game would be a good choice.  And I was right, with both she and my dad being able to immediately pick up on the rules.  Gwen and I still won the two games that we played, but everybody had a great time with it, and For Sale continues to be one of my favorite fillers and gateway games.

While Samantha was getting to be a handful toddling around the room and demanding attention, we decided to try at least one other game.  Partly because I wanted to see how it would work and partly because I really wanted to play it, I pulled out my pirate-themed version of Liar's Dice.  I taught them the bare-bones rules (no bidding aces or pickle rounds), and they seemed to take to it pretty well.  In fact, Brenda ended up facing off with me in the end, and even wound up winning!  I really wish that we could have given it another try with the "full" game, but Samantha needed to get to bed.

Speaking of Samantha getting to bed, most of the week's gaming for Gwen and me took place after she was sound asleep in her little Pack & Play.  And as do most of our 2-player sessions, Ticket to Ride dominated the action.  In all, we played 5 games of TtR, with Gwen being the overall winner by taking 3 of the games.  While the majority of the sessions used the "Mega" game from the 1910 expansion (our version of choice), we also tried out the "Big Cities" variant a couple of times as well.  Big Cities is maybe a bit tighter as far as board competition goes, but the biggest difference there is the ability to draw and complete crazy amounts of ticket cards (since they all connect to at least one of a relatively small number of  "big" cities).  

One evening also saw my 59th and 60th plays of Pandemic.  It's been a little while since we've played (I've been purposefully taking a little break from it in anticipation of the On the Brink expansion), so we played on the standard (5-epidemic) difficulty.  Both games were very close, with us winning the first as the board was about to explode into a nightmare, and then us losing the second simultaneously to both outbreaks and running out of black cubes while being only a couple of cards away from curing both of our last two diseases.  Like I said, I can't wait for the expansion, and I really hope that those around me will be excited enough about it to let it hit the table pretty frequently again (for a while at least).

And to round out the week, I decided to introduce a couple of new games to Gwen as well as these old favorites.  Unfortunately, both of them were pretty big flops.  First off was Cold War: CIA vs. KGB, which I really like as a nice two-player card game, and I was hoping that the interesting card play would catch her interest as well.  But alas, she wasn't in much of a mood to learn a new game at the time, and she never got into it enough to try and figure out the possible card combinations.  

But even worse was her reaction to Kingdoms.  I thought that she would like the simple, mathematical game play, but instead, she didn't react too well to the directly confrontational nature of the game.  You see, Gwen is wayyyyyy more competitive than I am, and the fact that the game is at least half about screwing over your opponent brought out some tense moments.  The main problem was when I managed to get 5 points of castle into a really good row that scored me around a hundred points.  We almost quit the game right there to avoid further marital strife, but continued to the end anyway.  And then, after all her frustration and complaining about having no chance, she (of course) ended up beating me on the strength of a good 1st and 3rd era.  Still, as much as I personally love it, I doubt that this will hit our table ever again.

And that brings me up to the present, where I wait anxiously for game night this evening.  Now I just need to figure out what the musical theme will be to go along with Toledo...