Category: games

We got Lego Creationary and tried it out. It’s fun, but is pretty short on rules. “Your game, your rules” say the instructions. That seems kinda lazy to me on the part of the designers. Rules are supposed to take a lot of work and modification to create the most fun game play. This isn’t work that should be left up to the players. I have similar problems with Scattergories…”name something you eat that starts with C”….”cardboard…what? you could eat cardboard”….so subjective. So yeah, I’m a stickler for rules. We also played (and lost) several rounds of Pandemic the other day. That game is hard! Maybe we’re not following one of the rules or something. 🙂

Mattel (who owns Scrabble in the UK) is going to change the rules of Scrabble to allow names?  That be wack.  The reason they weren’t allowed in the first place is that people would just make up high-scoring names like Zyqax and say, “what?  I could name my kid Zyqax.”  I hate boardgames with subjective rules that are wide-open to interpretation and you just spend the whole game arguing.  Outburst had this problem.  “Things to eat that start with C.”  “Cardboard…what?  You could eat cardboard!”

My board gaming uncle was visiting recently.  We played Caylus Magna Carta, Dominion, and the Pandemic expansion.  We found out we’d been playing Pandemic wrong and in a much harder way because I misunderstood one of the rules.  No wonder we could never win.  (Unfortunately, we’ve tried this cooperative board game again a couple of times recently and still never win.  That game is teh hard.)  Dominion is a pretty good card game in which the cards have the rules written on them.  (I usually don’t like card games because they’re often random, but this one’s good.)  Every round of Dominion can be different because you can select what cards you want to use in that round.  You can play Dominion and other boardgames for free online at this German site.

Another trip to Peralta and another game from Uncle Keith’s case o’ games. It was Stone Age. It takes a while to learn and play the first time and we made a lot of mistakes, but it’s a good game. The most amusing part of the game was that it comes with a manly leather dice cup and many illustrations of large-bearded men. It changed us somehow.

We visited my grandparents in Peralta yesterday. My uncle brought his famed case o’ boardgames…obscure boardgames that are often pretty good. We picked Pandemic, which turned out to be a really good cooperative game. Four of us tried to find cures for four diseases around the world. It was good enough that we played it three or four times, even though we lost each time. The diseases suddenly outbreak and spread around the globe, so it’s very difficult to contain them before they’re out of control. It really got into our heads while we were trying to sleep, so we were having obsessive thoughts/dreams about it. One funny part about the game is that you determine who goes first by whoever was last sick.

Sets of these marble toys were $2.50 at Target, so we got 4 of them.

Vanessa just got a board game called Bananagrams. Well, actually, it’s just a bunch of Scrabble-like tiles. Both players play simultaneously and independently, trying to use all their tiles to make a freeform crossword. When you use all your tiles, everybody has to draw another tile. If you can’t handle stress, this is a bad game for you. You can get badly behind and feel like Lucy Ricardo when she was working on that candy assembly line and falling so far behind that she was having to stuff candy into her mouth. It’s possibly a bit more fun than Scrabble because there’s no ten minute wait for someone (me) to take their turn. A minor annoyance is the self-marketing nature of the game. Players are supposed to say Banana(tm)-related phrases as a part of play. “Split” to start. “Peel” to draw another tile. I assume it’s to make sure that any guests remember that the name of the game has something to do with bananas, so that they can be sure to buy it when they get home. Instead, say “start”, “next”, and “done”, and replace the banana game pouch with a normal bag. Fight the marketing! Wait a minute…I’ve just created a huge ad for them.