by Loofish
I don't tend to play a lot of new games in a given month, never mind day. So this past Saturday at my friend Rick's house was an exception. It helped it was a week past his birthday and we played his newest acquisitions. This was headed off by:Village, the 2012 Kennerspiel winner. My wife and I arrived early especially to play this, as we would be 6 later and this one is 4 at max. First impressions were good, but with no idea of what to do that might be effective. A learning game for everyone, we all tried out different things to see where it led. Kristi worked the markets hard, Rick got grain (and livestock) and put it into the market and the church. J was very effective in travelling all around, as well as pushing up her council position. I eschewed the market mostly, but did some traveling, had a council member and put a fair bit in the church. J really looked ahead after 2/3 of the game, her traveling completed, working the council chamber for points. She also did remarkably well preserving her folks, the head of the council at the end the only survivor of that venerable first generation. That did cost her some in the history books though and she had not put much into the market (a late rush to take up the cloth was all her effort there too). Kristi was a long way behind on in game scoring but an impressive stack of market tiles sat in front of her. Rick had a few of those too as well as several church men, matched by mine. In the final addition, Rick's one token traveler, who went out, visited one place and died, scored him a bunch of points that pushed him above me and Kristi, with J just a little behind.
Rick: 65
Me: 61
Kristi: 59
J: 53
Post game discussions showed we felt that it had a lot of promise and Rick's mid-game observation that traveling or council were something you needed to get into (at that time, he had neither) proved mostly correct as he had cleverly taken my place in the history book. It might be hard to get to the table with the group (we are often 5), but my wife looked interested in picking up our own copy for some 2 player. It ran a little long on first play, over 2 hours, but I suspect that will come down now we roughly know what we are doing. Even today it has the ol' brain whirring, wondering how to approach things next time I play.
Rick's other birthday present came into play with the rest of the group assembled. It was time for plotting and subterfuge with:
The Resistance, a game which I had considered picking up for myself on a few occasions. Again, we were all playing for the first time and there was a learning curve, as we had not really played a game like this before. Unsurprisingly, some rookie mistakes were made. Like in the first game, Tom asked what color was which and I said (too fast) that Spy was red and then couldn't remember what color the Resistance was! We lost that game. The second game was very straightforward for the resistance. 3rd game I was a spy again, Rick and Kristi were suspicious of each other and I was playing them off each other. Of course, my plots were discovered but my partner was safe - so I thought. But Tom had snickered when Rick did something silly when we had eyes shut, giving him away so we lost that one. Then again, I'm a spy, we got rapidly found out and we began to wonder how to get a spy win. Then Jessica played up her confusion of the game to good effect and no one believed I wasn't a spy so they allowed her to pick the final mission team and that was that.
Game 1: Resistance win (Tom, Rick, Kristi, Jess) Spy loss (J, me)
Game 2: Resistance win (Rick, Kristi, Tom, me) Spy loss (Jess, J)
Game 3: Resistance win (Rick, Kristi, Jess, J) Spy loss (Tom, me)
Game 4: Resistance win (Rick, Kristi, Tom, J) Spy loss (Jess, me)
Game 5: Spy win (Rick, Jess) Resistance loss (Tom, Kristi, J, me)
We played 5 times in a row, which didn't take long, so we gave it a fair shake. My wife didn't like it much though, being both a bad liar and finds it hard to tell liars for herself. I have the problem that I am often under suspicion (which played out to the Spies' benefit in the last game). But I found there less deduction that I had hoped, the amount of information you get is limited, though Kristi did well at reading people, I guess I am just more analytical and so I found the game itself a bit underwhelming. It is short though, so I'd play again if everyone wanted to.
With the evening moving on, we thought it was time for titanic battle for who would be:
King of Tokyo. This was new to only Jess, but we all had a pretty good time with it as is usual. For once I was not first out, as I used burrowing to damage monsters and then with plenty of my own health took out two with a card that did 3 damage to everyone. But I went against my strategy, lured by the Tokyo bonus points and stayed in too long and J took me out with a mighty swipe of her cybernetic paw. But she was hurt badly and couldn't hold out against Tom's attack, so it was a face off between him and Kristi who hung on for a while but Tom held Tokyo and racked up the points to win.
Alienoid Tom: King of Tokyo
Kraken Kristi: runner up
Cyber Bunny J: 3rd
Meka Dragon Me: 4th
The King Rick: 5th=
Gigasaur Jess: 5th=
So now it was the party game part of the night. That meant it was:
Time's Up!. We split into 3 teams, with the 'best' players teamed with the less experienced. We are relatively experienced - a memorable New Year's Eve game about 10 years ago springs to mind. But my wife always has trouble with this, not knowing a lot of pop culture figures (and generally being bad with names) but both Tom and Jess had more trouble - not knowing the people and then not getting what they could do to overcome that. The first round stretched out a long time where getting a single card was doing well, but it progressed, accelerating at the end, with K&J and R&T almost neck and neck. Jess and I were consistent, scoring 9 per round, despite my best efforts. :) It was close after one round, but increasingly K&J were on the same wavelength and their lead stretched. The 3rd round was a blowout, both other teams got 9 each, with K&J gathering the rest.
K&J: 57
R&T: 36
J&me: 27
I've said before, I prefer Title Recall as titles are easier to break up than people's names. How do you act out Chelsea Clinton without words? But despite our poor showing, I had a good time with this.
Time for one more? Yes indeed and one more new to us. Did we save the best for last?
Bubble Talk was the game. It is basically Apples to Apples but captions applied to pictures. Highly random and the occasional funny moment did emerge, but I can think of other party games I'd rather play. Tom emerged victorious in the best round in which I had 5 actually funny captions to choose from.
The Apples to Apples mechanism of a judge picking from the submitted answers in clever but in that game and in this (which is would be instantly improved by allowing players the ability to write their own captions a la Say Anything) it just feels very arbitrary who's answer gets picked and a lot of the laughs are mild amusement rather than from the belly.
That grousing aside, it was a good night, with lots of games played and good times. And I even managed a rare blog post to follow it up.