Another board games post

Last week, Game Fanatic’s board games all arrived on Monday and last night we finally finished trying all the new games out. I think all of us like all of the games in their own ways…Except that Lego Lover didn’t play one at all so it would be hard to know his opinion. Game Fanatic I played Summoner Wars, which is a two player card/board game. I was worried it would be too overwhelming but I found it was playable. Also, GF points out there is an iPad version so I could practice strategy there even though the free version only has one deck available. GF also realised he’d made a couple mistakes when explaining some of the rules. As it is, we’ve tried so many games this week I’ve just about forgotten that game now although I do remember that it was a lot easier to work out than Magic the Gathering was…(we spent a lot of money on MTG a couple years ago but haven’t played in over a year or more and none of us recall how to play…as we’ve invested so much money I’d like to get back to that and learn it properly again. ) GF also played the Scientist on Wednesday when I was out. He won both matches with ease, of course. :)

The second game was Kings of Tokyo and that was quite a lot of fun for all of us. The game was easy to learn and relatively quick to play. Well, it would be quick to play but Lego Lover takes a long time with most of his turns for some reason…even when he does understand what’s going on. Sometimes Lego Lover also plays rather recklessly and ends up losing when he might have won by playing more practically. Actually his recklessness is usually related to his desire to make sure his dad is hampered at every step of the way. I think that’s often more important to him than winning.

Last night we played Evo, which was created by the same guy who designed Smallworld. This was by far the most involved set up of the three games with GF referring frequently to the manual to figure out how many of each item was needed based on number of players. The actual game play wasn’t too hard but it does involve quite a bit of strategy. I randomly ended up being the first player at the start of the game which would usually be an advantage in most rounds. Later on I fell far behind and never managed to recover. It might be a bit better now I understand the basic play a bit more but I think getting behind like that pretty much locks one out of opportunities to recovery. I did get a card rather late in the game that would have helped a lot more but it was rendered fairly useless by the time I got and used it. All that said, if a player were more aggressive and willing to battle, I think it’s possible to do better than I did. Funnily, Lego Lover was determined to win a battle with me and had about five opportunities to get a dice roll in his favor and failed…He was less concerned about winning than beating me in that instance…And of course he was quite busy trying to prevent the Scientist from getting anywhere and wasted quite a lot of opportunity and points…otherwise I think he possibly could have won the game.

We still have more games to come but they probably won’t arrive for a while as they are mostly on backorder from an Australian company on the east coast.