Games and Games Over Winter Break

One of my many friends named Dave wrote a good year-end game review blog entry (here), which prompted me to think about all the games I meant to blog on and never got to.

You see, I had this l'il problem over the holidays - I had to rebuild my PC not once but twice. Anime is PURE EVIL I tell you. Pure evil!!!!! My daughter loves anime and manga and went to a site she wasn't familiar with to DL a video; that was ad-ware hell #1. After the rebuild, she thought that it was only anime video files that were problematic, so when she went to another yet unfamiliar site to get only pictures, a more serious, alleged ID-theft virus got into the registry and all that fun stuff. It took me 12 hours to fully rebuild. Thank goodness we have an external hard drive to keep out those overseas anime ad/spy/virus-writing hacks.

Anyway, while I like Race for the Galaxy and Agricola more than my friend, the above link nicely covers why each of the games mentioned are excellent ones; Pandemic (pictured above) and Dominion especially.

I had meant to do the uber-geeky thing with this blog to log game nights, and with the aforementioned distractions, got away from it. So here is a sum of all the games I remember playing over the holidays (someone let me know if I remembered the details wrong here):

-First Friday on break-
Game: Dominion
Players: Brian, Dave, Rob
Winner: Dave

Game: Galaxy Trucker
Players: Brian, Dave, Rob
Winner: Rob
I *think* Rob won. I remember this game well, as we played with the IIIA boards for the first time, and my ship got hit twice in the mid-section: the first exposing a weak spot and the second exploiting it for what I believe is the largest to-date chunk of ship to break off yet. I went the way of Khan big time to the great amusement of the others. I actually made it to port sans engines, but half my ;arge ship broke off, and I wound up owing money upon docking.

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-The following Monday-
Game: Fluxx 4.0
Players: Brian, Dave, Lee, Rob
Winner: Dave
Nice new card art, though this particular game went a bit long for Fluxx.

Game: Agricola (aaaaa-greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee'-co-la!!!!!!!!!!!!)
Players: Brian, Lee, Dave, Rob
Winner: Brian
Got my farming up and going quickly, and being able to ignore 2 Begging cards certainly helped. Thanks to Dave for being willing to play, as this isn't one of his favorite games. Not a thanks to Dave in the incessant chanting of Agricola as you would hear on the Ricola commercials....

Game: Dominion
Players: Brian, Lee, Dave, Rob
Winner: Lee
In one of the lowest-scoring Dominion games I can remember, Lee won on hos first attempt. Nice going, Lee.

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No gaming that Friday, as it was just after XMas.

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-The following Friday-
Game: Stone Age
Players: Brian, Dave, David, Rob
Winner: Brian
David did well for most of the game, but I had a huge end-game bonus for hut-builders of 56 points.

Game: Dominion
Players: Brian, Dave, Rob
Winner: Rob
Even though both Rob and I had our machines going well, Rob won handily.

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Saturday
Game: Pandemic
Players: Brian, Randy, Holly, Ruthie
Winner: Disease
Great game teaching Randy & Holly for the first time, but we lost. We had the game end in sight, but 2 players before we could finish off the last 2 diseases, the player draw deck ran out. That is the first game I have played where we lost to the deck, as it is usually to the number of outbreaks making us lose. A good time though.