The Somewhat Late "What I got for Christmas" Article...
December is a pretty big month for me to get games. Between my wedding anniversary (on December 16) and Christmas (including the BGG Secret Santa program), I have a lot of opportunity to pick up games from my wishlist. And between having a couple of family gatherings bleed over into January and then having to exchange a couple of duplicate games in for others, I've only recently completed my game-getting for the holidays. And in all, it's a pretty great haul...
I've already played Rattus, Chronicle, Belfort, Biblios, and Sentinels of the Multiverse. Onirim was on my list mostly for the solo-play options, so I'll try it out as soon as I have some time to myself. The Resistance shouldn't be hard to get to the table, but I'm going to have to plan a bit to arrange games of Merchants & Marauders and A Game of Thrones. (My idea for AGoT is to have a special Saturday in the ole' game room dedicated to it, so let me know if you might be interested...)
But for a number of reasons, these weren't the only games that I've gotten over the last couple of months. Whether I've got them as review copies, made trades on BGG, won them as prizes, been given them to playtest, or just bought them in one way or another, I also picked up:
Ticket to Ride: Asia Map Collection (actually my gift to Gwen)
Kingdom of Solomon
The Manhattan Project
Venture Forth
Loopin' Louie
De Vulgari Eloquentia
Lord of the Rings LCG: Khazad-dum Expansion
Pocket Rockets
Chaotic Connections
Black Friday
Mousquetaires du Roy
Rory's Story Cubes: Actions
VivaJava prototype
So, I'm gonna be busy. Heck, I've got a stack of rulebooks on my nightstand that I still need to read, and game night's gonna be packed for a while.
Anybody want to play some new games?
Hey! I also call Onirim and Belfort for Christams. I'm loving Belfort. Onirim is OK.
Definitely let me know what you think of Merchants and Mauraders. I like a lot of what I've seen, but pirate games always make me leery. Most of them are big let downs.
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Assuming that I ever got to actually play Merchants & Marauders, I'll be sure to do so.
Belfort is our Game of the Month! this month, but it's actually having a tough time getting played mostly just because there are so many new games that we've gotten ahold of recently (most likely due to Christmas). I pretty much expect Onirim to just be "OK", but am mostly hopeful that it'll be a quick and light solo experience for me.
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Onirim is weird. I'm definitely not a fan of the uneven distribution of colors and symbols; there are three keys and four moons in each color, but an increasing number of suns (five through eight) that forces some colors (especially brown) to be more precious than others (notably red).
Plus, the entire (base) game seems to revolve around drawing as many keys as possible, both for eliminating/avoiding Nightmares via Prophecy (or just discarding the key to one) and for randomly lucking out on door draws. If you can't do that, then a Nightmare will screw you out of winning, no matter how you deal with it.
I haven't tried two-player or any of the expansions yet; I'm not in any rush to make the game harder. As solo play goes, Onirim is a better alternative to, say, Klondike Solitaire, but only a little.
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