The Fury of Game Night

Last night we had another newcomer join us for Game Night. Gene was introduced to our little group by Christopher. Hopefully he'll become a regular.

My first game of the night was Mykerinos. Gene, Oren and Adam joined me for a nice four player game while we waited for others to arrive. I've played this game a few times now and I must say that I really like it. (I'm sure that the fact that I won again has nothing whatsoever to do with that.) It's a nice quick area control game with a little bit of a production element: the tiles you win in a round give you abilities which you can then use in subsequent rounds. There's a nice balance to be struck between deciding when to go for tiles, when to improve your scoring multipliers in the museum, and when to conserve your cubes for subsequent rounds. Gene mentioned that he's heard it compared to Louis XIV and although I hadn't noticed it at first, there are some superficial similarities. Mykerinos is a much simpler and much shorter game, and that appeals to me quite a bit. This is definitely a winner in my book.

After that game broke up, Adam, Greg, Oren and I joined Chris for a game of Fury of Dracula. This is an updated version of an old (1987) Games Workshop game. The new version is by Fantasy Flight and has been given the standard Fantasy Flight treatment: which means it looks really nice. It's a good game but it can be really long. Our game lasted several hours and consequently was the only other game I played this evening. The game itself plays an awful lot like Scotland Yard with fighting and random events. One player (in this case Chris) controls Dracula and tries to escape from the others who play characters from the book. The game is played on a luxurious map of Europe and the vampire hunters move from city to city in an attempt to track the count and put and end to him. We lost but only just barely. We had several chances to kill him but each time he managed to pull off a lucky escape. And that's one of my complaints with the game is that it does seem to be a little luck heavy. Still, there's enough tough choices in the game to make it interesting and it's definitely loaded with theme.

Other games played this evening include Aladdin's Dragons and Power Grid. And I'm quite sure there were several others.