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November 12, 2004

Holiday Games

Went over to Cthulhia's yesterday, taking advantage of the day off, and chatted about games and puzzles before playing a few games, including two new to me, with her and DougO who was also there. While we chatted, Cthulhia worked on her Pysansky project (very pretty wax painted egg shells).

The first game we played was Snap which really should be called Snap Dragon as the game is all about connecting domino like tiles (2x1 shape that is) with Dragon graphics of body segments, tails and heads in three colors. The tiles are neat in that they only snap together when the colors of the dragons match correctly so the physical game components nicely enforce the rule of keeping dragon colors matching. The game is somewhat too tactical and defensive so not too many big dragons are made but it is pretty enough that I may still buy a copy and try to think of variants to improve the gameplay a bit.

Later, we played the newly released Sid Sackson game Buy Word which is basically a multiplayer solitaire version of Scrabble. Despite the solitaire aspect, I still quite enjoyed it. The only real negative was the downtime while others were trying to make words but you weren't ready to yet, but we managed to parallelize this a bit more than the game called for, which was good. This game really encourages making very long words (and also using lots of rare letters), which can be as long as 14 letters in the most extreme case. I drew a lot of the high-scoring letters and made the word "Muzzles" to score a very large number of points and carry me to the win.

We finished with a game of Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers which is a fine game but I significantly prefer the basic game with the two main early expansions (Expansion and Builders & Traders).

Posted by aarondf at November 12, 2004 04:43 PM

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