Game night at the Game Boy Geek’s house

If you follow me on Instagram, you saw that last Friday I got to meet the Game Boy Geek himself, play games are his house and bask in the glory of his awesome board-game room. How cool is that?! I seriously still get starstruck when I meet folks from the Internet who are very active in the board-gaming world. And it all came to be because of a happy coincidence!

The week before, I had been talking on Twitter with Greg Dickson about Cthulhu Wars when he realized that I also lived in Phoenix. And then he had mentioned that he plays board games with the Dan King, aka the Game Boy Geek (who also lives in the Phoenix area), and then I got invited to game night. Sweet! Fast forward a week, and I’m suddenly meeting a whole bunch of cool new folks who also like to board game! Dan, especially, was very friendly and inviting, and such a great host. The whole night was so much fun!

I ended up playing 5 games the entire night. First up was Why First? It’s a fun quick card game where the entire goal is to come in second place.  Ha! It’s actually a lot harder to accomplish. The game plays through in five rounds. In each round, you get five cards that have various positive and negative numerical values, and everybody plays a card simultaneously on yourself or others, but the last card of the five has to be played on yourself. The cards are resolved in each turn, and you move up or down the track. After five turns, the round ends and the person in second place gets points. After five rounds, the person with the second highest score wins the game.

Next up was Five Tribes.  It’s a good game that I haven’t played in ages. Plus, there are a bunch of meeples! It’s not a hard game to teach (one guy was totally new to it), but I love how there’s a lot of strategy and brain-burning energy spent during the game. You also can’t plan your moves too far ahead, as the meeples start moving all around the board. I ended up coming in second place with Dan winning first.

My third game was Valley of the Kings: Afterlife. Two of us ended up playing this deck-building game about Egyptian nobles preparing for their death and filling your tombs with jewelry, weapons and artwork. You end up getting more points when you collect sets of items in your tomb. I’m familiar with the deck-building mechanic, but I slowed down a bit to understand all the different cards’ abilities. I eventually found my groove though. The game lasted about an hour, and I ended up losing by 10 points. Bummer! The challenge in the game is keeping good cards in your deck to buy better cards vs. entombing those high-value cards, which then won’t be available in your deck. I probably started entombing cards too late in the game, but now I’ll know for next time.

Lastly, we played two very, very different games of Camel Up. It was my first time playing the game (I think I had suggested it actually since I don’t know anybody who owns it). I’m a total sucker for cute meeples, in this case, camels that stack! The basic premise of the game is to race camels around the board and get the most money. You can either advance the camels via a dice roll, bet on which camels will win or lose the entire game, or bet on the placement of each camel during a round. The first game lasted about 30 minutes.

And then we decided to play Camel Up Supercup with all the expansion’s four modules … and that game almost lasted 2 hours.  We probably broke the record for the longest game of Camel Up ever! The four modules included making the race track longer and adding supporting dice, adding a photographer and rewards for camel stacks passing by, more flexible betting on camel positions, and betting partnerships that allowed players to reap their partner’s rewards. And that’s how it ended up being so long. We all agreed that we would never play all four modules at the same time ever again and that the photographer module would be a cool element to add to the base game without adding time or complications. So that’s how my night went at Dan’s home. Fun times indeed!

Next weekend I’ll be in LA for Strategicon. I’m super duper excited for the convention, and I’m hoping (**crossing fingers**) to be able to get into a game of Virgin Queen, which the convention scheduled 11 hours of game time for. Yep, you read that right. I’ve seriously been walking around the past 2 days with the rule book, which is an insane 44 pages! I’ll post one roundup after I get back from LA, but will definitely be sharing updates through social media.