Wednesday, January 7, 2009

1/6/09

Played a few board games on Monday and Tuesday. And I finally got the project sheet into a workable form for the proposal. But the board games stick in my mind. My niece Kali and nephew Davey came over. Davey was content to plop himself in front of the TV and play some of the video games I have that he doesn't. They got a PS3 for Xmas and I feared they'd have little reason to come over once they duplicated most of the exciting entertainments I can offer. Therefore, the Wii is my trump-card.

In any case, Kali's always pretty generous and good humored about playing board games with me. I know she'd like to do some rpg stuff, but I'm still working on the setting and stuff for her. She's given me a tough assignment, modern fantasy with echoes of John C. Wright's Orphans of Chaos trilogy. Anyway, we played two games. The first was Starship Catan, a two-player semi-card game based on Starfarers of Catan which in turn was based on Settlers of Catan. I won, but in part because of a rules mistake and in part because I'd played once before. She seemed to enjoy that game pretty well...at least better than the other couple of games I'd recently shown her. Less successful was the Alhambra Dice Game. It plays with 2-6 players but doesn't scale particularly well down to the low numbers. There's a real runaway leader problem, especially if one player hasn't played before. So we got halfway through before calling it since I was kind on pounding her into the ground. That's an exception to the rule-- she usually can beat me, but only if she knows the rules.

In our Tuesday boardgame night we tried two of the games I'd traded for-- Transamerica and Oasis. Both were good, and also fairly simple. Of course I made a pretty major rules error in the latter game, but we all played by it so it didn't make a real difference. However, I suspect it will make the game even stronger the next time we play.

How's that for boring trivia?

No comments:

Post a Comment