As mentioned in the Australia Day post, we have some new board games at our house. Games Paradise, a retailer from the eastern states, had sale on during January for 15% off everything until stocks ran out. I ordered two games earlier this month: Blokus and Smallworld. The latter is a game wanted by Game Fanatic for quite a while now. He’d found out about it in some roundabout way through his favorite website, TV Tropes, and was obsessed with getting it. He also had various other games or dvds he wanted and still hadn’t gotten a copy by Christmas. Blokus was an extra to push up the total enough to get free shipping.

Blokus

Blokus has turned out to be incredibly easy to learn and lots of fun to play. For my part, it is also a game I seem to be be reasonably good at playing, so there’s a decent chance I will win the round. The game consists of four sets of playing pieces, in different colors. Each set is comprised of all differently shaped pieces. There is a square, tiled board where the pieces are placed so that same colors only touch at corners. The goal of the game is to to play the most number of pieces of all the players. We’ve played quite a few rounds and the lowest score so far has been 2 pieces left. The nice thing about this game is its playing time is short enough (about fifteen minutes) that it’s not necessary to block off several hours of an evening to play. The only drawback is that you really need four players for a decent game. It just doesn’t work very well with anything less.

Smallworld

We’ve only played Smallworld a few times so we are still learning the ins and outs of the game. There are a lot of pieces in the game, but not all of them are used for each game. It looked really overwhelming when we first started and it takes a bit of time to set it up. The game is a sort of world domination sort of game…a bit along the lines of Risk but seemingly less complicated from what I can tell. There are a number of different races(dwarves, elves, humans, etc.) that each player eventually will choose from. The races are paired with a power (e.g., berserker, heroic, etc.). These are paired in a random order before the start of the game. The first player must choose a pair to start the game and this influences how many playing pieces are received by the player to use on the board. I will also point out that different boards are used, depending on the number of players. It gets bigger, the more players involved. The first player must place all the units on the board strategically before the next player starts. There are ten rounds (I think) in the game. The first one is essentially a setting up phase. During subsequent rounds, the object is to conquer as much of the territory as possible, based on the game rules. At some point, a particular player may lack the ability to do much more so has the option of going into decline. This leaves certain pieces on the board for the original combination to claim territory and allows the player to start again with a different race/power combination the following round. A player can go into decline as often as they like within the ten rounds of the game. Points are scored each round, based on how many territories are controlled by the player.

The first game went kind of slowly so that we ended up reducing the number of rounds so that we could finish before it got too late. Everyone was enthusiastic at the beginning but Lego Lover lost some interest after awhile and wasn’t active in the latter part of the game. On Australia Day, he’d been ready to give it another go but the game had to put away due to delays in getting started. The game claims its age range is 8+ but I think it’s a bit complex for younger kids to play with any chance of being competitive with older players.  I might have judged it more appropriate for a ten year old.

We’re enjoying playing the board games so much, I ordered more games last week and they arrived Friday afternoon. I will write more about those in another post. I think one of our next games will probably be Ticket to Ride. We played this once at a friend’s house a few years ago and really enjoyed it at the time. Game Fanatic is also keen to get a player expansion for Settlers of Catan so he can play with his Dungeon’s and dragons group. There’s been discussion about mixing it up a bit and having regular board game days instead of the usual D&D, so he’s keen to share some of the games.