Steve's HFoG Blog: Tuesday Game Night Write-Up

Last night was Game Night and this time I actually showed up on time! Not only that, but I brought my son Kray (13 1/2) along. Kray had a fantastic time and I'd like to thank everybody for making him feel welcome. He's now begging to come back. I can probably leverage that somehow. *Evil chuckle*

Kray, Mike M., Oren and I opened the night with Turn the Tide while we waited for the others to arrive. It wasn't long before the Seattle gang showed up and got a game of Money going. Money's a quick Knizia card game loosely themed around money exchange. It's a nice game but it's never really resonated with me. Perhaps I just haven't played it enough.

Both games broke up at about the same time leaving us with ten players. We spent the next few minutes discussing important things like what to eat and what to play next. We settled on pizza.

Mike M., Mike K., Jose, Tejas and I decided to commit to something beefy so we pulled out Traders of Genoa. This is an excellent (and rather long) trading game. It's one of the better games in big-box Alea line. The Geek has it ranked 58, very high indeed. I'd only played the game once before, and that was a long time ago, so I was quite fuzzy on the rules. Thanks to everyone involved for being very patient. This is a rather complicated game (although once you get going it all makes sense) and so it wasn't too surprising that we got a few rules wrong at first. The worst mistake had to do with the use of the building ownership tokens. We caught the error a couple of turns in and everyone graciously agreed on a reasonably fair way to correct the error. I'm sure it affected the game but we all treated it as a learning game and in spite of the earlier gaffes the game ended very close. I believe that there were three of us within 25 points of Mike K's winning score.

Meanwhile, the others: Christopher, Birch, Wade, Oren and Kray, played La Città. This is another very long, very meaty game, and it's also highly ranked on The Geek, coming in at number 69. Personally, I've never played the game but I hear very good things about it. One of these days I'm going to have to give it a try. I know that Kray really enjoyed it. I believe that Oren won the game. In fact, some of the comments that I heard lead me to believe that he pretty much crushed the competition.

Both of these games are very long games and I was pleasantly surprised to see that, miraculously, they both managed to finish at roughly the same time. We mixed the group up a bit and played a couple of shorter games as closers.

I can't remember what the others played, but Kray, Mike M., Mike K, Birch and I played Tutankhamen. This is a very nice light set collecting game by Knizia. I really like the latest Out of the Box version of this game. The pieces are great, the pyramid is kind of fun, and everything fits neatly in a really small box. This isn't the deepest of games but there are enough decisions to keep it interesting, it's quick enough to be played as an opener (or in this case a closer) and it supports up to six players. All good. I like it.