My 10s

I'm trying to work on the stats here! I've got everything I need - time, working computer, red wine... but boardgamegeek is down or busy or something. Aaargh! So instead, I'll blither on about the games I have rated 10. No point wasting good red wine.

So a strange thing happened last week. I decreased my rating for Domaine from a 10 to a 9.5 in recognition of the fact that at the moment I don't feel like playing it. I haven't figured out why that is, maybe it will come back into favour when I do play it. This article is not about what's wrong with Domaine, this article is about what's right with the others.

I find myself wanting to play Scrabble. I swear, it's nothing to do with the seductive nature of the ladies at the Scrabble club. I like the game. Finding words and anagramming really work for me. Memorising word lists doesn't, which is why I'll never be a great Scrabble player (actually, I have another 40 years I suppose, it might happen), but I really do like the struggle of finding a decent word worth decent points and getting the sucker on the board.

I really like Mystery of the Abbey as well. I like deduction games a lot, maybe because I often do well at them. In fact there aren't enough of them around. Cyberkev disses MotA, saying too much card passing goes on, but as part of the game is to know what cards to pass I don't find that a problem at all. And I love, absolutely love, the meta-game where you can ask other players "are you going to accuse..." and then try to steal the win from them. Not to mention that the bits are beautiful, and I'm a tart like that.

Lord of the Rings - the Confrontation is an absolute genius of a game. I forgot how much I liked it till I played Ozvortex a couple of months ago. The sides are so different, and it's so beautifully balanced. Yes, you do need to know every detail of the rules to play really well, but I just wish I had a handy opponent who would play frequently. My kid doesn't like it :-(. He will when he grows up, and then I'll unlock his bedroom door. Ungrateful wretch.

My final 10 is Trias. It has fairly crappy bits, though dinomeeples are cool. But I like the way you can drown other people's dinos, and sometimes they like that, then you fill the verdant shore with happily grazing dinos sneering into the water at the struggling swimmers. I'm sure if I was good at it I'd be able to look at the board as a map of low and high potential zones and be able to identify optimal fault lines, but until then I will just stick to opportunistically drowning the opposition. Maybe that's why I like Tongiaki as well.

A Long Weekend

In our part of the world we've just finished a three day weekend, during which I played a lot of games. That's what life's all about, n'est-ce pas? Here's notes on a few of them.

Gulo Gulo - I was sitting around at BIG wondering what to play next, and there was a little girl wandering around too. I got Gulo Gulo out of the car, grabbed non-cyber-Kevin, and we played three games. Kevin won all three games, which wasn't very nice to the poor little girl! Anyway she said this game was much better than rolling the dice for Dad, and I promised to bring it again next time which will be in August as the kid and I are going to ConVic next month.

Lord of the Rings: The Confrontration - The kid surprised me by suggesting a game of this at BIG. We played, and I remembered what a truly excellent game it is. I won as the light. The kid remembered why he didn't like it. I played another two times against Ozvortex the next day, and it was still great. I upped my rating on BGG to a 10, I love this game. BTW, Ozvortex and I both won as the light, with Frodo slipping through both times.

The Adventures of Harley - played twice with the kid and the niece and the nephew. We lost both times! OK, not as simple as I thought. We might even try it again.

Hive - Ozvortex brought his new Hive over to show us, and he and the kid and I played each other. The kid defeated me, Ozvortex defeated the kid, I defeated Ozvortex. I quite like it, and the bits are magnificent. It's a bit disturbing that there is no board, but it gets you thinking. I like the grasshoppers, and don't like the spiders. Funny story - the kid hates grasshoppers. I had him sweeping the back deck and a real grasshopper jumped off the broom onto his leg causing a major panic screaming attack. I took it off him and while he gasped for breath told him that Wayne had brought along a nice game about insects that we were going to play...

Give Me the Brain! - Another one Ozvortex showed us. Pretty silly, but not too silly to play. I'll have to get the colour version. When my nephew can read he'll love it.

Make'n'Break - I have been looking at this one for a while. Pauli has a copy, so we played that. It's a pretty decent dexterity game, better than I thought it would be. I think I'll buy it as a present for someone.

Memoir '44 - The kid and I had a game using the winter board. He had a lot of Finnish ski troops whom I blasted fairly quickly. Must get the Pacific expansion.