Holiday gaming recap
So it’s been a crazy few weeks with the holiday season and then me getting sick. But now I’m back to 100 percent and trying to make up for lost gaming time. I totally get cranky when I don’t game at least twice a week.
First off, I received Five Tribes for Christmas from my sister. Woohoo! Who doesn’t love a giant bag of meeples?!? I plan to write up an overview about it soon. I was lucky enough to travel to my hometown for the holidays, and, of course, I never travel without a board game or two in my luggage.
At one family gathering, my cousins and I played Mysterium, Hanabi and Jenga. Mysterium brought a crowd to the dining table because of the colorful artwork and just the sheer number of cards for a 6-player game. Also, people seemed fascinated by my dedication to the hobby as I had sleeved every single card for the game. We ended up losing one game.
Hanabi was next. My cousins seemed to enjoy Hanabi better, in comparison to the abstractness of Mysterium. In Hanabi, players work together to put down cards in sequential order by color in order to build a fireworks display. The trick is you can see everybody else’s cards except yours. Through clues, you work to guess what cards are in your hand and when to play it. My cousins and I got some good scores for our fireworks display and even played it a second time.
And of course, Jenga, though not a board game, is always fun to play in the wee hours of the morning. There’s so much tension and stress to avoid being THAT GUY who made the tower topple.
At a second family gathering, there was even more board gaming! This side of the family plays a lot of board games, so we spent most of the day gaming the new gifts I purchased for my nephews. One game was Qwirkle. For a younger kid’s game (ages 6 and up), I had a lot of fun playing this. There’s a challenge to wrapping your mind around finding the same color (but different shape) vs. finding the same shape (but different color). My nephew for whom the game was for proudly won, meanwhile, us adults were like, how does this tile not fit? It was a lot of fun.
And lastly, we played a game that was totally new to me called Expedite. My cousin had just received the game as a Christmas gift, so he, his son, my sister and I read through the directions and figured out the game together. The mechanic is similar to Ticket to Ride where you are trying to complete routes across the world. To do this, you collect different colored cards. When you have enough cards of a certain color, you can purchase a hub in a city.
To complete a route, you must own the hub at the start of the route, and you get victory points traveling through hubs along your chosen route. If you must pass through another player’s hub, that player receives victory points instead of you. Also, you can knock a player out of a hub by paying double or triple the costs, depending on how many previous owners are there. The game was a lot of fun, and my sister ended up annihilating us.
And that sums up my board-gaming adventures during my Christmas vacation trip. Goodness, how is it mid-January already?