This year I took off work between the Christmas and New Year’s holidays to spend time with family and friends. As a result, I got a lot of board gaming in. From the 23rd to the 28th I played 26 games (4.3 games per day). On the 31st I hosted a game day to ring in 2010 and racked up 7 more plays. I thought I’d share some of the highlights of the gaming binge:
Tobago: I first saw pictures of this game on BoardGameGeek and instantly knew I had to learn more. The pieces are amazing (an “Inside the Box” should be coming shortly) and the reviews stressed the “fun” of the game. The highlight of my plays so far was the surprise curse! We had divvied out 1 treasure (5 cards big) and then a second was found (7 cards big). The first 12 treasure cards can’t be cursed so I was explaining to everyone (while we were examining our potential share) that this treasure was still “safe” but after that it may be cursed. As soon as a finished speaking I flipped the first card up and it was a curse! My mouth dropped. How could that be? Then I realized the first treasure was 6 cards – not 5! I’m sure my face was red.
Small World: I also received this as a Christmas gift along with the Cursed and Grand Dames expansions. Fortunately, all the games of this played out much better than my last play. There were two SmallWorld highlights in one game:
1 – My frugal brother-in-law is always getting great deals on things because of his bargaining prowess. It was funny to see him predictably always pick the “cheapest” special power/race combination – especially when it gave him a few coins along with it.
2 – We also had one combination randomly occur that gave everyone a laugh: Wealthy White Ladies
Twilight Struggle: Russ brought along his newly acquired copy of TwiStrug and I helped my little brother, Brad, play a game against him. Brad got consistently good hands – a rarity in this game. Russ got consistently poor hands often hindered by 1 or 2 scoring cards. Brad also had the dice gods on his side as he hit every roll and Russ had miss after miss. I think it was only turn 5 (or maybe 6) that Brad won a automatic victory with 20 points. He was ready for another easy victory. The next game was more typical and I taught him a lesson: beating him by 10VP in final scoring.
Texas Hold’em: Our family played two games of Texas Hold’em. The first with no money that I was skilled enough to win. For the second game we all threw in $5. I was unlucky and was knocked out in 4th place. (Notice how I was “skilled” when I won and “unlucky” when I lost.) My wife went on to beat Brad for 1st place – he didn’t catch the ace he needed. While we cleaned up, I put was putting the cards back in the pack. That’s when I noticed the Ace of Spades still in the pack. We had played the entire game a card short! Needless to say, we all took our money back.
New Year’s Eve: This was our first ever “Day of Gaming.” We started playing the first game at 10:00 AM and the last one finished a little over 12 hours later. Over a dozen people playing a wide variety of games and as many as three games going on simultaneously. We also made up a scoring system to keep track of plays: each game played got you 1 point + 1 for each person you defeated. Of course this was criticized harshly as it was completely unfair to everyone: coming in 2nd or 3rd place in a large group game win netted you 5 or 6 points while a hard earned 2+hr war game win only got you 2. But there was no prize for first place so in the end no one cared too much. Although I will say I ended up on top with 18.5 points in 7 games!
Looking back 2009 was a good start to my board gaming hobby. What are your highlights of 2009?
Posted by Rick 
Margin of Victory 