Games Day XXXVIII

When I landed in Cali on Saturday, I got my rental car and went to my hotel. I took a short nap, and then went to Games Day in Los Altos. I showed up there around 5:30pm, and didn’t leave until almost midnight! I met a couple of really nice guys, Rick & Eric, and gamed with them the whole evening.

We played:

Around the World in 80 Days: This one was fun enough to play again, but I definitely wouldn’t buy it. There really wasn’t much to the game, and the end-game goal makes sense thematically, but didn’t seem to work well as a game mechanic...

Web of Power: This was one of the games I brought down for the event, not much to say about this game, except that I love it because it’s so elegant. I need to pull this one out more often (which is easy to do, since it plays so fast!)

Ra: I’m not a big fan of auction games, this one included... This play through, I felt like I really had a handle on the values of tiles and therefore had a better idea of when to declare ‘RA’ or when to sweeten the pot. This is one of the games that I own, and am on the fence about whether to keep it or not.

Klunker: A cute card game where you buy, sell, and collect jewelry. It seemed pretty light but had, I thought, some pretty weird/confusing rules. I followed it just fine, but a newb playing with us was pretty confounded. It seems like it could be a mass market game, but doesn’t play like it.

Lost Valley: As the rules were being described, I said “this sounds Goldland-y.” I was right, and it has the same problems as Goldland. It’s funny, because these types of games always initially appeal to me, exploration, harvesting, using different tools, etc. They sound like they’ll be tons of fun to play, but they turn out to be kind of boring in execution. I think the problem is, players have too many options and they spend too much time trying to find the best possible move to make. As we were starting the game, I thought “this might finally be the exploration game I’ve been looking for.” By the end of the game, I knew it wasn’t...

And, so how did I do at these games? I got second in every single one! Seeing that 3 of them were new and I was playing with people that had played them before, I felt pretty good about my performance!