Yeah, yeah, I know. It's been a while. A long while.

Well, a lot has been going on. Naturally I was pretty busy with the holiday rush. I'm still feeling the effects of that. What's more, I've also changed jobs in the last few weeks. (Yes, the secret is out. HFoG is not my day job.) So that has kept me extremely busy as I get up to speed in a new work environment. Furthermore, the new job is in downtown Seattle so that's added a considerable amount of time to my daily commute. It's time spent on the bus so I can use it productively, but it does lengthen my work day a bit.

But that's not why you're here. You want to hear about games. My Tuesday game night hasn't changed. I still play every Tuesday night in Microsoft's building 50 cafeteria so let's talk about that. (And yes, you're still invited to join us.)

Last night we played Battlestar Galactica again. We had a full compliment of six players and once again, the humans lost. I swear, every time I play this game the Cylons win. And naturally, I have yet to be a Cylon. Bummer. But it was a fun game that came down to the wire. We honestly thought we had a chance at it until about two turns from the end. Then a few basestars appeared, flooded the skies with Cylon Raiders, and overwhelmed our poor fleet before we could make the final jump. Good times.

Next up for me was a game of five player Mü. This continues to be my trick-taking game of choice. I've played hundreds of games and I never grow tired of it. Last night the card gods deserted me. I couldn't get a decent hand to save my life. But at least the company was good!

Last week we played Condottiere for the first time. Condottiere is a card game masquerading as an area control game. There's a small board depicting northern Italy. Players battle over provinces by playing cards. It sounds good on paper but I must admit that we really weren't all that excited with it after playing it. I'm sure there's a good game in there somewhere but for us it seemed way too random. Perhaps that's because we played with four players. Is it better with two? I couldn't say.

We've also been playing a fair amount of a new cooperative game called Red November. This is a rather silly little game where a submarine piloted by gnomes (yes, gnomes) encounters one crisis after another and the players' task is to survive a number of turns before rescue comes. It's not to be taken too seriously and with too many players it can tend to bog down (particularly if they each think they should be the leader) but with a smaller group of players it's pretty fun. One thing that surprised me though is that it comes in such a small box. It comes in one of the small Fantasy Flight boxes (roughly 8x4x2 inches) but it's packed so dense with bits that the box barely closes. There's a surprisingly large fold-out board and dozens of cards, counters, chips, and figures. Once your done playing you may find yourself wondering how you're going to get it all back in the box. Anyway, I liked it quite a bit. Perhaps I'll write a more in-depth review here in a bit.

I'm going to try to recommit to updating this blog again now that things are starting to settle down a bit here. Thanks for still reading in spite of my sketchy update schedule!