18 days, 13 games, 38 matches, 2 common denominators.
18 days, between mid-December and early January, with a Christmas holiday in between, family gatherings, and the appropriate protection measures of these silent twenties. Time to have more players around, time to play more.
13 games of various types, shapes, and forms. Abstract or themed. Short or longer in duration. Mostly at two player count, but also at three, and in larger teams.
38 matches, not least because there are games that immediately demand for a rematch.
2 common denominators: all of those were played in family; Leonor was a partner in all the thirty-eight.
Codenames Duet and Codenames. The most played ones. These are the kind of games almost impossible to play just once! Very accessible to everyone who likes playing with words and with their meanings. Searching for more obvious or more unlikely associations, providing far-fetched clues that we trust our partner or team will understand, seeking to avoid misleading ones that could point to words of the opponent, or even worse, to the word where the assassin hides.
At two in the Duet version, the first one entering our home. At 10 players and three generations, in the competitive version between two teams, in a race always tense, in which it is not always easy to resist giving away, or looking for, non-verbal clues! And, furthermore, for the very first time, we experienced a game with a double agent, at 3-player count.
Sagrada e Azul. Two games featuring regularly at our table, or on other tables. Very pleasant, at touch and sight. Tasting as an abstract puzzle, almost like a solo game, were it not for the shared pieces.
It is always a challenge to efficiently fill-in our own stained-glass window of the Sagrada Familia. Placing the colored dice according to the restrictions of our base, avoiding adjacent dice of the same color or of the same value, attempting combinations that earn you points, surgically using some tools to mitigate the effect of luck, trying to keep the options open for the final stages, those in which free space in the stained-glass is scarce. And then, there's always that person who first gets the dice so badly wanted...
Likewise, it is very appealing to build our mosaic of Portuguese tiles. More tactical at 2-player count, plays equally well at three or four players, while requiring a somewhat different approach. Go for columns, rows, or sets of tiles. Go for adjacent placements to immediately earn some points. Avoid wasting tiles. Choose carefully between those in one of the factories and those of the common area. Watch the opponents' panels, playing with the timing of your choices.
Find out some more about
Sagrada and
Azul on this blog.
Keltis. This one, having 2008 as publishing date, has been around here for some time. But I just cannot get enough of it, and even though it is, deep down, a race, I even find it to be relaxing.
It is a pleasant combination of five routes, to be walked through with our stones, the movement being based on the placement of cards of the suit corresponding to each route, in ascending or descending order. With a few more bonuses along the way, enabling to walk faster, to get some points, or to collect gems, you need to manage the chance associated with the card drafting, timing the advance on each route. To spice things up a little more, the moment where the game ends is not fixed, depending on the turn when enough stones reach the most advanced ranks of the paths.
Heaven & Ale. Becoming ever increasingly fond of this game of monk brewers, full of difficult choices!
An area for growing products, half in the shade and half in sun, in which the products planted in the former may be sold for cash, whereas those in the later will improve the quality of our crafted beer. Five different ingredients, requiring a balanced mix each with a palette of values: water, wood, hop, barley, and yeast. Monks to go out work in the fields. A master brewer who must evolve throughout the game, or else we will not obtain a tasty beer. Limited actions and resources.
Will I choose to get some wood, to recruit a monk, or to trigger a special action? Those I will not choose right way will most probably be picked by some of the other players … Place in the sun or in the shade, quality or money? Still have that feeling of not having played it times enough to be sure of what I am doing around.
And there is more to get on the table: the expansion Kegs & More, adding cartwheels, inns, and the distribution of beer, one of the games I translated to Portuguese.
Takenoko. The Panda and the Gardener arrived here during the first lockdown. A colorful and bustling invasion, with an expanding terrain of large hexagons, the need to irrigate the land, and the bamboo sprouts, first planted, then growing, and, from time to time, eaten by the hungry creature. Plus, some dice rolls, bringing some unpredictability turn after turn. The objective cards for punctuation seem somewhat unbalanced, but that is something to be checked later, and it does not spoil the entertainment. Always fun!
Blackout Hong Kong. A game that I am still discovering, at a slower pace than Leonor, or so it seems! With the underlying theme to reset the electricity in the districts of a Hong Kong plunged in darkness, it is my first contact with the games of Alexander Pfister.
This is a game of resource management and fulfillment of objectives. Management of our intervention team, with elements with different individual abilities. Time management, because the team elements deployed will not be readily available again. Management of resources, necessary to fulfilling the various objectives, to extend our range of action, and to improve our own capabilities. Risk management, since the exploitation of unsafe areas, essential to make progress, inevitably cause some casualties that end up in the hospital.
An excellent combination of elements and diversified game processes, which are not hard to assimilate in a pair of games. That is what we did, going for a second round, soon after the first learning play was over. A game to play more often, with the advantage of having a solo campaign variant, although without a virtual opponent.
Concordia. An excellent game, with extremely simple and very elegant rules, based primarily on the use of action cards, and yet with a deep underlying strategy.
Expanding our influence and producing goods in the Italian peninsula or around the Mediterranean Sea, aiming high, the Roman way. Building cities, sending our settlers by land or sea, producing fabric, wine, tools, bricks, or food. Using Diplomats, Senators, Tribunes, Traders, Architects, Specialists of different crafts.
This is another game I really need to play more often, and another one where I must attempt to shorten distances to my gaming partner’s scores! As in Blackout Hong Kong, these are games requiring some more time to play, especially at higher player counts. Nevertheless, it is time well spent!
Still to try out, the Venus expansion, another one I translated.
Solenia. Another game that I am very fond of, because of the beauty of Vincent Dutrait's art, and the gaming originality, conferred, above all, by the continuously moving board, alternating between day and night, just as in a planet in rotation.
Collecting resources from the production zones where it is always day, to deliver them to cities where it is always night, and vice versa. This is our mission, as described in
here.
With simple, advanced, and solo rules, the exploration of Solenia continues. Think I will really have to paint that yellow plastic ship, to better match the remaining components.
Rossio. Always special to return (strange verb to use for a game released in 2020) to this game designed by Orlando Sá. This is because I had the opportunity to test it as a prototype, during the final stages of development, at two and three players, and in particular soloing against Ross, the bot.
With another Portuguese theme, the author's brand image, Rossio has an original scoring system. The pavement being built is truly a public space, not belonging to any of the players, and where every and each one can score the patterns that are being made. This implies that, with good planning, points collected in each turn will be increasing throughout the game, with most of the points for grab depending on the last few rounds.
Railroad Ink – Deep Blue. Another puzzle-like game, this time a truly individual one, in which the options of each player do not have any effect whatsoever in the game being played by the others. And yet, it feels good to play it together! A game with a taste of summer, with the refreshing blue shades of this version, and perhaps also by having played it firstly in the past summer holidays.
All you have to do is roll the dice and trace roads and railways, intersections and multimodal connections, rivers and lakes, to obtain more points, or to suit your imagination.
Holmes: Sherlock & Mycroft. A game just for two, which I haven’t played in a while. The theme of the investigations of the famous detective serves as a backdrop, with its array of characters with their own characteristics. As for the theme, this is just about it, as you will be competing to get more clues (cards) in each or some of the sets (suits) than your opponent. No mysteries to unravel, but a fight for majorities bearing different values.
This is a fast-paced game, with a fixed number of turns. It has variability, from game to game, since most of the characters will enter the scene in a random order, with their abilities becoming available at different times and in different combinations. Plus, being very compact with a small board and a small box, it can be taken anywhere.
