So, my computer at work needed to be upgraded to Windows 7 and I had a half day of PTO hanging. (Personal Time Off which is a combo of sick days and vacation and technically as a salaried employee, I can't take a half day at a time.) Michicon started at 1, so I dropped off my computer (after backing everything up) and headed for home. I got there and discovered that Hanson wasn't keen on going for some reason. And there was this tree that had blown down. And you can see where this is going, right? It was decided that it made sense to clean up the tree.
When I say tree, I don't mean some weed with a six or eight inch trunk and twenty or thirty feet high. This one had around a two foot trunk and had previously grown at a nearly 45 degree angle to the vertical. I'd built a play structure partly around it and put steps on it for the main entrance (the rope ladder and rock climbing wall still survive. The main exit a slide was partly under the tree corpse. One of the four 4 X 4 support verticals also got cracked by the tons of tree. So, long story short, with the aid of a 20" electric chain saw, the branches less than six inches were all sawn into firepit size. Also four cuts through the trunk allowed us access to the cracked support and provided a nice twelve to fifteen foot fire seat only a little further than optimum from the pit. There's probably another fifteen to twenty foot chunk that will eventually need to be sectioned, but I can stall that! This took us up to ~7:30, I was beat and the bugs were starting to bite, so we called it a day. A couple medicinal beers and some ravioli and I called it a night.
Saturday morning, Hanson had a hockey game. After the Clarkston JV dispatched their rivals, Lake Orion, we got home ~12:30 and hemmed and hawed and decided to skip Michicon, so Hanson and I went on a bike ride to the library to return the MASH DVD's, pick up some new ones and hit the bike store for some chain cleaner. On the way, he got a text from his buddy Conner who is always talking about games, so we rode by his house and kidnapped him. Despite him getting a flat on the way to our house, we made it and got right down to gaming.
My first order from a game store in about eighteen months (Kickstarter took most of the budget since I discovered this new form of crack) included Saint Malo. I knew nothing about this except that it was an alea game. Fortunately, the rules weren't complicated, so we went through them and started building our cities by virtue of rolling dice well. When we first opened the game, I thought there must be something missing, but it turned out that the player boards, markers and dice are all that are needed for an intriguing little game of building a city to withstand pirates and garner VP.
Each turn five dice are rolled, yahtzee style (three rolls, keeping any desired between rolls) and then the player can pay two gold to change the face of a die to whatever is desired except no dice can be changed to or from a pirate. Then the results are marked on the player boards. The city is a seven by seven grid with the corners not available. This leaves twenty five center spaces where anything except walls can be built and four rows of five spaces where anything including walls can be built. A die has one face each of a log, a crate, a church, a person, a wall or the aforementioned pirate.
After rolling and possibly paying to change the faces on some di(c)e, the player selects one type of icon to use and marks the results. In addition there is a cumulative count of all the players' pirate results. If a player chooses crates, he marks in as many spaces on his board as he has crate results. If logs are chosen, the player marks that many logs in his storage area, but has to pay two gold for the delivery. If walls, the player draws that many wall segments. When a complete row of five walls are completed the player gets a two defense strength (per wall) and gets a bonus of VP, money or a person (up to three value). If the player wants to use the people face, he gets to add one person (that takes up one space in the town). With only one person die, all that can be added is a citizen which is worth 1 VP; with two faces either a soldier (one defense) or a merchant (one coin per adjacent crate) can be added, three faces allows a builder (who then converts up to three logs to adjacent houses for 3 VP each) or a priest (1 VP per adjacent church), four allows placement of a juggler (2 VP per adjacent person type), while five allows a noble (7 VP). Church faces allows placing one church with a number written on it up to the number of churches rolled.
Every time a number (scaled to number of players) of pirates are collectively rolled, the players all face a pirate attack of increasing strength. The first attack is only one strength, but the sixth one is twelve. If a player doesn't have as much defense as the pirate attack strength, he marks off a cannon (minus five VP).
Play continues until a player fills in all forty-five spaces in his town and any following players get a turn so all have the same number of turns, then the final VP are calculated. In addition to scoring during the game, players score for churches and for completely filling their town. Church scoring is for a string of churches with consecutive numbers starting from 1. So if a player hasn't built a church with the number 1 on it, he gets no points up to fifteen (I think) for one of each church from one to five. Players also get a VP per unused log and for each two doubloons.
Hanson as third player filled his town first, so the game ended immediately and he wound up edging out Conner, both with scores in the thirties, while I was languishing in the teens. The only pirate loss was one cannon in Conner's town. I liked this one and think the two kids liked it also. Conner described it as fancy Yahtzee and while there is some truth to that, players have more control and decisions to make than the description implies.
Next up, King of Tokyo with the newly acquired King of Tokyo: Power Up!! Conner quickly understood the rules, so we set off to trash Tokyo. For some reason, this wasn't described as Yahtzee, maybe because it uses six dice? I really like the evolution cards added in the Power Up! expansion. We each won a game, two by last monster standing and one by points, I think and decided to play the fourth game as Championship of the World. To mix it up a little, we used the draft variant for the evolution cards. Conner selected all keepers and got three or four of them out as he cruised to a VP win.
After a short break and chicken patty sandwiches, we started up again with another new one, Love Letter. Hanson and I had played at Origins and I actually held up my game order until this one was in stock. Unfortunately, they only had one copy, so unless I break down and sleeve and print more, we are limited to four players. This was my first time with three players and I think it works well at that number. I think Hanson won, 5-4-4.
Then we pulled out Hanabi and started giving clues, discarding (all too often important) cards and building fireworks. This game is a deck of cards, five colors with 3 ones, 2 each two, three and four and 1 five in each color. Players always have a hand of five cards, but with a twist. Your fellow players can see the faces of your cards, but you cannot. Each turn a player can give a clue, discard or attempt to play a card. Giving a clue costs one of the initial eight clue tokens and a player tells another player which of his cards are of a particular color or which of them area particular number. All cards that match the description must be indicated. A player can discard a card to regain a clue token or can attempt to play a card. Discarded cards are out of the game. Playing a card means it in the center in five ascending stacks, one of each color. If the card cannot be played (it's not the next card needed in the stack of its color), players burn part of the fuse (remove a marker). Three misses and the players lose with a score of zero. Otherwise play continues until the last card is drawn and one more round. The players' score is the total of the top card on each stack. We got 13 on our first game and 18 on the second and collectively only used two fuses, I think. Hanson really liked it, Conner thought it was ok. I still like it a lot and look forward to getting it to the table again.
We broke out one more game Fairy Land. I picked this up to get above the $125 for free shipping and it was a pleasant surprise. Players are trying to collect sets of flowers and to have the most of each of the animals while avoiding goblins. Each player get a set of fairies to bid with, one of each 1-7 value and a coat of arms card. Each turn, a player turns over two cards and puts them into one of three clearings and takes an action, explore, visit the queen, visit the druids or use an action card. At the end of the turn if any of the clearings have six cards, they are discarded out of play.
When exploring a clearing the player can put one of the clearings up for a once around auction. Bidding starts to the player on turn's left, so the player on turn gets last chance to bid. Only the winning player pays his bid and collects the cards in the clearing and puts them face up in front of him. If no one bids the cards are discarded.
Visiting the queen means spending fairies and drawing face up that many cards from the queen's deck (one use action or continuing effect cards) and selecting one. Visiting the druids is similar, but from a nine card deck of normal cards and only the player on turn sees them. The selected card is then placed face up.
The coat of arms is an action card and many of the queen cards have an action. The coat of arms action allows the player to retrieve his expended fairy cards, for example. An example of a continuing effect card is to reduce the negative effects of goblins or ogres.
Mixed in the deck of animals and flowers are ogres and goblins. When an ogre is collected, it is discarded along with two flowers and/or animals. Whoever has the most goblins at the end loses two points per goblin.
There are a different number of each animal from one unicorn to ten raccoons (?). Whoever has the most of each animal type gets as many points as there are animals in the deck. Players score for both variety of flowers as well as sets of the same color flower. Conner came close with a flower only strategy, but I managed to pull out a win with a lot of animals and a few flower points.
At this point, we tossed Conner's bike in the van and returned him home so we could get to bed for a big day Sunday (no gaming).
Around 8:30, Lisa, Quinn, Hanson and I headed for downtown Detroit. We met two of Lisa's sisters, a brother-in-law and a nephew (with two urban explorer friends from out of town) for crepes at Good Girls Go to Paris. After that, Vince and his friends went off to look for more photo ops while the rest of us headed to the RenCen for a Segway tour.
Segways are cool. Lisa and her sisters had taken a tour in San Diego and the rest of us learned how quickly and we were off. We went down the river walk, through a state park (only one in Michigan inside city limits) and then started into town. Unfortunately, at that point Greg didn't pay enough heed to the oft repeated "Watch your wheels!" mantra and clipped a curb. His vehicle stopped, but he didn't. It turned out that he broke his wrist, so he and Trina headed back with one of the guides and we caught up with them in the ER later. The tour continued through a few areas where the residents decided to spruce up the deserted buildings with spray paint. There were some good pictures and some ok ones. Then we hit the Heidelberg Project which I thought was ok. Basically a couple blocks of houses and yards(some with residents, some abandoned) have been turned into an art show. All of the material used, including a half buried Hummer were found in Detroit. A quick zip through the Eastern Market (mostly closed except on Tuesday and Saturday) and then a zip down a very nice rail to trail path brought us back to the state park and the riverwalk and the RenCen.
We then took Sue to the ER since Greg and Trina had her car and waited a while. We eventually gave up (on what proved to be a couple hour wait to get X-rayed) and headed home stopping at Vinsetta's Garage (a sister restaurant to our favorite Clarkston Union) on the way.
Hanson had practice that night and I brought my bike along to kill time while he skated. After passing through part of Pontiac, I discovered a really nice bike path (Clinton River Trail) and am looking forward to more riding there!
The practice evidently paid off as Hanson popped in two goals in Monday's game!
When I say tree, I don't mean some weed with a six or eight inch trunk and twenty or thirty feet high. This one had around a two foot trunk and had previously grown at a nearly 45 degree angle to the vertical. I'd built a play structure partly around it and put steps on it for the main entrance (the rope ladder and rock climbing wall still survive. The main exit a slide was partly under the tree corpse. One of the four 4 X 4 support verticals also got cracked by the tons of tree. So, long story short, with the aid of a 20" electric chain saw, the branches less than six inches were all sawn into firepit size. Also four cuts through the trunk allowed us access to the cracked support and provided a nice twelve to fifteen foot fire seat only a little further than optimum from the pit. There's probably another fifteen to twenty foot chunk that will eventually need to be sectioned, but I can stall that! This took us up to ~7:30, I was beat and the bugs were starting to bite, so we called it a day. A couple medicinal beers and some ravioli and I called it a night.
Saturday morning, Hanson had a hockey game. After the Clarkston JV dispatched their rivals, Lake Orion, we got home ~12:30 and hemmed and hawed and decided to skip Michicon, so Hanson and I went on a bike ride to the library to return the MASH DVD's, pick up some new ones and hit the bike store for some chain cleaner. On the way, he got a text from his buddy Conner who is always talking about games, so we rode by his house and kidnapped him. Despite him getting a flat on the way to our house, we made it and got right down to gaming.
My first order from a game store in about eighteen months (Kickstarter took most of the budget since I discovered this new form of crack) included Saint Malo. I knew nothing about this except that it was an alea game. Fortunately, the rules weren't complicated, so we went through them and started building our cities by virtue of rolling dice well. When we first opened the game, I thought there must be something missing, but it turned out that the player boards, markers and dice are all that are needed for an intriguing little game of building a city to withstand pirates and garner VP.
Each turn five dice are rolled, yahtzee style (three rolls, keeping any desired between rolls) and then the player can pay two gold to change the face of a die to whatever is desired except no dice can be changed to or from a pirate. Then the results are marked on the player boards. The city is a seven by seven grid with the corners not available. This leaves twenty five center spaces where anything except walls can be built and four rows of five spaces where anything including walls can be built. A die has one face each of a log, a crate, a church, a person, a wall or the aforementioned pirate.
After rolling and possibly paying to change the faces on some di(c)e, the player selects one type of icon to use and marks the results. In addition there is a cumulative count of all the players' pirate results. If a player chooses crates, he marks in as many spaces on his board as he has crate results. If logs are chosen, the player marks that many logs in his storage area, but has to pay two gold for the delivery. If walls, the player draws that many wall segments. When a complete row of five walls are completed the player gets a two defense strength (per wall) and gets a bonus of VP, money or a person (up to three value). If the player wants to use the people face, he gets to add one person (that takes up one space in the town). With only one person die, all that can be added is a citizen which is worth 1 VP; with two faces either a soldier (one defense) or a merchant (one coin per adjacent crate) can be added, three faces allows a builder (who then converts up to three logs to adjacent houses for 3 VP each) or a priest (1 VP per adjacent church), four allows placement of a juggler (2 VP per adjacent person type), while five allows a noble (7 VP). Church faces allows placing one church with a number written on it up to the number of churches rolled.
Every time a number (scaled to number of players) of pirates are collectively rolled, the players all face a pirate attack of increasing strength. The first attack is only one strength, but the sixth one is twelve. If a player doesn't have as much defense as the pirate attack strength, he marks off a cannon (minus five VP).
Play continues until a player fills in all forty-five spaces in his town and any following players get a turn so all have the same number of turns, then the final VP are calculated. In addition to scoring during the game, players score for churches and for completely filling their town. Church scoring is for a string of churches with consecutive numbers starting from 1. So if a player hasn't built a church with the number 1 on it, he gets no points up to fifteen (I think) for one of each church from one to five. Players also get a VP per unused log and for each two doubloons.
Hanson as third player filled his town first, so the game ended immediately and he wound up edging out Conner, both with scores in the thirties, while I was languishing in the teens. The only pirate loss was one cannon in Conner's town. I liked this one and think the two kids liked it also. Conner described it as fancy Yahtzee and while there is some truth to that, players have more control and decisions to make than the description implies.
Next up, King of Tokyo with the newly acquired King of Tokyo: Power Up!! Conner quickly understood the rules, so we set off to trash Tokyo. For some reason, this wasn't described as Yahtzee, maybe because it uses six dice? I really like the evolution cards added in the Power Up! expansion. We each won a game, two by last monster standing and one by points, I think and decided to play the fourth game as Championship of the World. To mix it up a little, we used the draft variant for the evolution cards. Conner selected all keepers and got three or four of them out as he cruised to a VP win.
After a short break and chicken patty sandwiches, we started up again with another new one, Love Letter. Hanson and I had played at Origins and I actually held up my game order until this one was in stock. Unfortunately, they only had one copy, so unless I break down and sleeve and print more, we are limited to four players. This was my first time with three players and I think it works well at that number. I think Hanson won, 5-4-4.
Then we pulled out Hanabi and started giving clues, discarding (all too often important) cards and building fireworks. This game is a deck of cards, five colors with 3 ones, 2 each two, three and four and 1 five in each color. Players always have a hand of five cards, but with a twist. Your fellow players can see the faces of your cards, but you cannot. Each turn a player can give a clue, discard or attempt to play a card. Giving a clue costs one of the initial eight clue tokens and a player tells another player which of his cards are of a particular color or which of them area particular number. All cards that match the description must be indicated. A player can discard a card to regain a clue token or can attempt to play a card. Discarded cards are out of the game. Playing a card means it in the center in five ascending stacks, one of each color. If the card cannot be played (it's not the next card needed in the stack of its color), players burn part of the fuse (remove a marker). Three misses and the players lose with a score of zero. Otherwise play continues until the last card is drawn and one more round. The players' score is the total of the top card on each stack. We got 13 on our first game and 18 on the second and collectively only used two fuses, I think. Hanson really liked it, Conner thought it was ok. I still like it a lot and look forward to getting it to the table again.
We broke out one more game Fairy Land. I picked this up to get above the $125 for free shipping and it was a pleasant surprise. Players are trying to collect sets of flowers and to have the most of each of the animals while avoiding goblins. Each player get a set of fairies to bid with, one of each 1-7 value and a coat of arms card. Each turn, a player turns over two cards and puts them into one of three clearings and takes an action, explore, visit the queen, visit the druids or use an action card. At the end of the turn if any of the clearings have six cards, they are discarded out of play.
When exploring a clearing the player can put one of the clearings up for a once around auction. Bidding starts to the player on turn's left, so the player on turn gets last chance to bid. Only the winning player pays his bid and collects the cards in the clearing and puts them face up in front of him. If no one bids the cards are discarded.
Visiting the queen means spending fairies and drawing face up that many cards from the queen's deck (one use action or continuing effect cards) and selecting one. Visiting the druids is similar, but from a nine card deck of normal cards and only the player on turn sees them. The selected card is then placed face up.
The coat of arms is an action card and many of the queen cards have an action. The coat of arms action allows the player to retrieve his expended fairy cards, for example. An example of a continuing effect card is to reduce the negative effects of goblins or ogres.
Mixed in the deck of animals and flowers are ogres and goblins. When an ogre is collected, it is discarded along with two flowers and/or animals. Whoever has the most goblins at the end loses two points per goblin.
There are a different number of each animal from one unicorn to ten raccoons (?). Whoever has the most of each animal type gets as many points as there are animals in the deck. Players score for both variety of flowers as well as sets of the same color flower. Conner came close with a flower only strategy, but I managed to pull out a win with a lot of animals and a few flower points.
At this point, we tossed Conner's bike in the van and returned him home so we could get to bed for a big day Sunday (no gaming).
Around 8:30, Lisa, Quinn, Hanson and I headed for downtown Detroit. We met two of Lisa's sisters, a brother-in-law and a nephew (with two urban explorer friends from out of town) for crepes at Good Girls Go to Paris. After that, Vince and his friends went off to look for more photo ops while the rest of us headed to the RenCen for a Segway tour.
Segways are cool. Lisa and her sisters had taken a tour in San Diego and the rest of us learned how quickly and we were off. We went down the river walk, through a state park (only one in Michigan inside city limits) and then started into town. Unfortunately, at that point Greg didn't pay enough heed to the oft repeated "Watch your wheels!" mantra and clipped a curb. His vehicle stopped, but he didn't. It turned out that he broke his wrist, so he and Trina headed back with one of the guides and we caught up with them in the ER later. The tour continued through a few areas where the residents decided to spruce up the deserted buildings with spray paint. There were some good pictures and some ok ones. Then we hit the Heidelberg Project which I thought was ok. Basically a couple blocks of houses and yards(some with residents, some abandoned) have been turned into an art show. All of the material used, including a half buried Hummer were found in Detroit. A quick zip through the Eastern Market (mostly closed except on Tuesday and Saturday) and then a zip down a very nice rail to trail path brought us back to the state park and the riverwalk and the RenCen.
We then took Sue to the ER since Greg and Trina had her car and waited a while. We eventually gave up (on what proved to be a couple hour wait to get X-rayed) and headed home stopping at Vinsetta's Garage (a sister restaurant to our favorite Clarkston Union) on the way.
Hanson had practice that night and I brought my bike along to kill time while he skated. After passing through part of Pontiac, I discovered a really nice bike path (Clinton River Trail) and am looking forward to more riding there!
The practice evidently paid off as Hanson popped in two goals in Monday's game!