by Loofish
The number of new games in the house this festive season was pretty limited and, for the most part, bought by me. If the Powers That Be allow it, I might add a couple more, but this has the state of play (or rather potential play) for the moment.The big purchase was Mice and Mystics, which I bought on pre-order specifically for a Christmas present and represents the earliest I have ever got a Christmas present and still kept it as a Christmas present in the history of me. Both my kids had a blast with HeroQuest over the summer and this seemed like a natural fit.
The other thing I bought was Tony Boydell's Fzzzt!. I found it in the game store while waiting for my wife to do some other shopping and, given my son's love of robots and my admiration for the insanity that is Mr Boydell's BGG blog, I bought it.
The third and final physical game came about as follows: I get a text from my wife asking me if Rat-a-Tat Cat was worth getting. I looked it up on BGG and found it was reasonably well-regarded game for kids and told her so. "Oh good," she replied, "because I already bought it." The pictures are cute and the game looks pretty straightforward so we will give it a whirl once the shiny has worn off the kids' latest DS purchases a little.
The other new game was not a physical one, but Yucata.de gave all of us a Christmas present in Michael Schacht's Call to Glory. I had not even heard of this game before this announcement, but a quick glimpse at the rules and the Drew Baker art made me think it was something to have a look at. I played a quick game (1 round) with my wife live on Yucata and my opinion was increased. A simple game really - collecting sets of Japanese characters. Each character can only be played by one person so if you want to play your ninja down, you need to have more than are on the table already (or at least 2). Our initial game went quickly, as my wife pulled a string of pairs which pushed the end of the game very quickly. But a standard game is played over 4 rounds which should even out such lucky runs and subsequent games (also on Yucata, it is not too easy to get as a physical game in the US yet, though I am looking into it) have showed most rounds go a good bit longer with more back and forth. Actually our one problem with it was the standard game played via Yucata was a bit long - I can imagine it is quicker with actual cards in hand and no internet lag times. Plus the variants aren't yet available on Yucata, which add some extra dimensions to the play.
So once the Christmas gift-giving was done, the kids disappeared with their new acquisitions and my wife and I settled on the couch and games were on our mind (along with the various snacks and nibbles and mince pies). The standard game of Call to Glory we played that day. We also played some old-fashioned abstracts, Connect Four and Othello. Each of these games was notable in their own way, for my wife was not paying attention as we started the game and left me the opportunity to play a three with both ends open. I pointed it out and she persuaded me to give her mercy, which I did, but then she set up a winning position where if I blocked her four, she could make a four right above it, but apparently did this by accident rather than design as she made us play all across the board everywhere else until i asked if she knew she could win. Perhaps I mixed that gin and tonic a little stronger than usual?
That theory might apply to the Othello game as well. We don't play it often because my wife is so adept at it. I understand the game to a decent level - I know about corners and sides - but our games almost always go the same way, with me having a lot of my own color on the board for most of the game, only for her to work the corners in such a way for her to overwhelm me and win convincingly. That pattern repeated this game except for the end. I won the first corner but she nullified its advantage and in fact won the other 3, but she was far enough behind in tiles that she needed to win more on that last corner move and the non-corner play might have been enough.
So of course she wanted a rematch and that she won, though it was by the narrowest of margins. Either I am getting better or the gin was getting stronger.
We played Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers next, which I like a little better than regular Carc for its simplicity and clean rules. Not sure if my wife agrees any more after I scored regularly and well all game, with a decent hunting ground and prodigious fishing hut. One of those games where we quietly did our own thing that is nice for a sleepy afternoon game but a bit more elbowing for supremacy would make it a little better.
Another regular Yucata game for us is Balloon Cup (and another that is on my wish list because of that site) and my wife wanted to play that again. So we did. Not sure how it worked out, but we kept getting into fixes where there were very limited plays we could make due to the cubes of the board and the cards in hand (like blue and green cards but nowhere to play those on the board). It hurt both of us a few times, but the worst was where I was forced to play a high green to my wife's side, giving her that bunch of cubes and a cup to boot! Though I was always rather struggling to keep up, so it was probably for the best.
Final game was The Hanging Gardens, an under-rated game I think and one that puzzle-loving gamers should love. A combination of the puzzle of putting together your gardens (in different terrain types) and subsequent tile collection (to make sets), it is very very Euro but perhaps especially as a 2 player is very engaging for us. With more players, there are less turns each so the game becomes more tactical but at 2 you can definitely put together a long term strategy that pays off when you can make the biggest formations and score the most tiles. Indeed, in our first game, my wife was ruthlessly efficient in building her areas then culling then to make room for new construction while I played the longer game. And with the lead she built, it seemed like my long game had fallen short but 2 back-to-back big plays, I surged up and my wife was unable to score even a few points that last turn, meaning I snatched victory from her. She immediately demanded a rematch and this time we both played bigger and more strategically, a lot of back and forth and it could have gone either way until my wife made a big play, completing a set and grabbing the special tile for that set, which gave her enough of a lead that I could not catch up.
But ending the day with a win for her was not at all a bad thing. And an 8 game Christmas Day made for a happy one for me.