Fun times

We are continuing to play more and more board games as a family and the latest additions have been some of the most fun yet.  I will point out I rejoined Quickflix (sort of Oz version of Netflix) and have felt obligated to watch the dvd that arrives instead of what we really want to do to make it decent value for our money. After one month on a low price, I opted to cancel so we just have a couple more dvds to watch when they arrive and then they go back…so we can soon play the games as we want to do. A couple weeks ago, Discworld: A game of Ankh-Morporkh arrived in the mail and we eagerly looked forward to having time to play. For the Scientist and me, the game has a lot of meaning as we have read most of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series over the years. Game Fanatic knows the series only slightly from having been read one of the YA/children’s books many years ago but hasn’t read any further than that…after all, it wouldn’t do to listen to suggestions from the parents, would it? :D  Lego Lover has no interest in any of it and refuses point blank to even try playing the game. This was a disappointment but we had to carry on without him or never play at all. The game uses a deck of cards with various abilities/tasks on them and there are cards for many of the character from the series. Instead of a single goal for players, there are about five or six different goals over about eight cards. Three happen to have the same goal but are represented by different characters. Nobody knows what the goals of the other players are at the start so half the game play involves working out who has which goals and preventing competing players from winning…while also trying to win your own goal. It was mostly by chance but I won the first game we played and all three of us had a good time. It was far better than I expected it to be (being adapted from a series of books) so I imagine we will play that one often, particularly when Lego Lover isn’t interested in playing games.

Two other games arrived from here in Australia and we played these late last week. The first one is Ghost Stories, another cooperative game that goes really quickly. We found this one is far more complex in play than Castle Panic or Forbidden Island are  and were a bit tentative during our first game. I think we will play far better the next time since we have more of an idea of what we are doing now.

The second game is Cyclades, which has a Greek mythology theme which appealed to everyone. This game involved quite a bit more set up than the other recent acquisitions so we didn’t try it out until the weekend. It also requires a lot of space so we had to clear the kitchen table and use the extension to have sufficient room…even so it was a bit crowded on the sides where the boys were sitting. This game had elements of several others we’ve played recently so it was a matter of putting it all together and making heads or tails of it…We had a bit of trouble on our first play because it wasn’t clear how one was supposed to earn gold from early in the game and it seemed as though we were missing some elements of it. We played the game the best we could with the knowledge we had and the Scientist won that one. A bit of online research showed us where the missing information was…at the back of the manual. This wouldn’t be an issue normally except the manual has more than one language. When Game Lover was working it all out, he read to the end of the English language section…but there were diagrams at the back to show how the board was supposed to be set up at the start. There were also a couple smaller points that were clarified. We tried again on Sunday and it was so much better to play with some ability to win. This time, Lego Lover returned to his game goal that mostly involved making sure his father didn’t win…he was quite destructive in the game but he also nearly brought it to a halt. At the end, I wasn’t able to make any progress due to his strategy and decided to just play it through to the end. Despite his best efforts, the Scientist did win again by reaching a certain goal required…and so won it quite fairly the second time. It was a lot more fun and it looks like another winner of the recent games acquisitions…

The downside to all these good games is that we are sure to miss out playing other games because we like these so well.  We have three others still on the way…well one is on the way and one is on backorder and another is due to be posted out from the UK very shortly.