Guess who got to play some games recently?
It was ME!
Holidays have proven, over the past few years, to be boom times for boardgames. My game playing spikes every November and December, and I hope this year is no different. Last weekend, Jill's friend Kathy came for the night, and we got in several games of both Ticket to Ride Europe (my #1 gateway game) and Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers.
Yesterday, Gwen, Clint and their kids came for a belated Thanksgiving, in which Our Hero attempts his first turkey. Dinner was awesome, and was followed by much boardgaming. First, Clint taught me Blokus, and we played two games. We both played poorly in the first game, and improved in the second, but Clint beat me both times. Then I taught Clint Mr. Jack. He hung on as the killer with only two suspects for 4 rounds, forcing me to accuse one of them in the final round. I was wrong. He really played very well, thinking through every possibility. While it slowed the game down to a glacial pace, it was a great effort, and it payed off for him.
Then Clint played Stephen, fresh off of a string of Hey! That's My Fish! victories against Christine, at Mr. Jack. After all the youngsters were in bed, Jill and Gwen went head to head at Blokus. It was tense, tense, tense. Those are two competitive sisters right there.
Finally, we all played a game of Citadels. We played one rule wrong, in which an upturned King card should be shuffled back in to the character deck at the start of each round. I won pretty easily, having no trouble finding gold or maintaining useful cards in my hand. I was assassinated once, and one of my buildings was destroyed, but the rest of the game was smooth sailing.
Finally, I played a "goodbye" game of Blokus with Clint this morning. I'm really going to miss all of them. It's so nice when you get along with your spouse's family so well, and I love that we share this craze for boardgames. Their kids are really cool, too.
So, Blokus. You've seen it at Target and other mainstream stores. It's one of the few success stories from the "indie" gaming world. Blokus is an abstract strategy game played on a grid. In the 2-player game, each player has two piles of colored pieces. I played blue and red against Clint's green and yellow. Each set of colors has the same pieces as all the other sets. Within a set, however, all of the pieces are different (straights, ells, crosses, like Tetris). The game has two rules: When placing a piece, you must connect diagonally to a piece of the same color, and you must not connect orthogonally to a piece of the same color. In other words, blue pieces may only be placed where they contact with the corner of an existing blue piece, and cannot ever be alongside another blue piece. This creates gaps between blue pieces. There is no restriction on placing pieces next to a different color, as long as the placement is connected to the same color diagonally.
So you begin placing pieces from the corners of the board, in the order blue, yellow, red, green. Most people quickly make for the center of the board and attempt to carve out a zone of control. Once you are butting up against opposing colors, you have to decide whether to defend gaps or to invade the opponent's areas of the board. It is very hard to keep someone out of your area, as there is often more than one site to worm in. The game is over when no one can place any pieces, and is won by the player who has the least "area" of pieces left over (if a piece takes up 5 squares of grid, it's worth 5).
Close to midgame-- strangely, I don't remember the board this way. Usually, blue and red start on my side, and green and yellow on Clint's. Not sure how this happened.
I really liked this, as did Jill. I'm normally not big on pure abstracts, and I had initial concerns that every game would play out basically the same, but now I think that this could have some decent shelf life. The original version can play either 2 or 4 players, and there's a travel version that is 2p only. My BGG score is 7 out of 10.
Christine, Elaine, and Senor Froggy Buddy
Yet another comment! Glaciers move faster than Marc and Clint playing Jack. We fed Elaine three bottles and changed two diapers (one of them poopy) during the duel of the tortoises. Glaciers also talk more than Marc and Clint do while they are playing Jack.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, Stephen played the winner (he very patiently read two books and watched a 30 minute Scooby-Doo while waiting to play), and that game was quite fun to watch, with Stephen jumping up and down and analyzing out loud.