I Like Word Games But...

On the recent trip down to the Blue Mountains I played a great many games. I was badly beaten at Maharaja, Mu, Expedition, and more. They were all games I didn't really get into, couldn't concentrate on, and played badly at. We also played a couple of word games - Milleranagrams and Knizia's My Word! In those I played much better... in fact everyone conceded they were playing for second place. I was grateful that I was able redeem myself and prove that I was good at some games, at least, but it's a little disturbing that most word games I play aren't even a close contest. It makes it difficult to get opponents.

Here are some other word games I play and my thoughts on them:

Scrabble - I like playing this, and in the only game I've played recently other than at Scrabble club Mrs CyberKev beat me. The Scrabble club is a source of people who are good at word games, but how many 70 year old ladies will come out for a games meeting?

Milleranagrams - I may own the only copy of this existing in the world. I think it's an Australian thing, and my mum bought it in the 70s. The rules are somewhat vague, having been written by a crazy professor, but you can make enough sense of them to play a decent game. If you've ever played Snatch, it's like that with turns.

Snatch - Scrabblette recently bought a copy of this which we played last night, and that's what got me thinking about word games this time. In games where you steal words from other players, I do that all the time. Thank you Scrabblette for not stabbing me in my sleep.

Man Bites Dog - A game of making newspaper headlines. I thought it desperately needed some house rules to make it interesting, but the kids didn't mind playing it.

Scrabble Card Game - I previously blogged about playing this. It's a decent substitute for Scrabble but I'd like to play it again before I make any definitive statements about it. Scrabblette got badly screwed by the random distribution of the bonus cards.

Lexicon - An anagramming game where you can be screwed by bad hands of cards which evens it up a little. I think Scrabblette won this when we played with the CyberKevs. It moves a bit slow for me - I can tell when there's just not a word to be had, and then I have to wait for my turn.

Pass the Bomb - A quick thinking game where you have to think of a new word following some pattern while passing a bomb around. Whoever's left holding the bomb when it goes off loses a point. It works OK but with a group of good players it's all luck. I gave a copy to my sister for Christmas and we played with the kids which was pretty funny as they made up words and tried to fob the bomb off to the next person.

My Word! - The Knizia game where cards are laid on the table and people call out words made from 3 or more of the cards. When CyberKev was doing the card-laying he went quite fast which made the game fairly chaotic. I don't really like the rule that if you call out a wrong word everyone else gets a card, but I can't see a better alternative.

Wordigo - Wordigo is a strange multiplayer solitaire word game where players compete to lay words along individual tracks. I had a solitaire game which presented some difficulty. I'll have to try it again, I don't remember so much about it. Heck, that was before Christmas that I played that!

Smart Mouth - Smart Mouth comes with a cute little gadget that spits out two letters - one that starts the word and one that ends the word. First person to say a valid word scores. The trouble with this game is that after you play it a few times you know words for the 400-odd combinations it can throw at you, and if you can spout them out in half a second you won't be beaten. The words you need to remember are NAWAB and MEMSAHIB.

Boggle - I feel like I don't play this very well, but the time I played against the kid and his mum they vowed to never play against me again. I have an electronic version in the glovebox of the car but I probably shouldn't play it at traffic lights.

Acronymia (unplayed) - An acronym making game. I haven't even unwrapped it yet so I don't know whether it should be on this list.

My Word (unplayed) - Received in a trade from OzVortex. It looks like Carcassonne with letters instead of towns and roads.

Super Sentence Cube Game (unplayed) - I have a suspicion that this game is totally broken. It contains things that aren't words, and the bits are falling apart. Maybe I should play it with my nephew, who can't read anyway.

WildWords (unplayed) - A Scrabble variant with wilcard tiles and negative points for playing on some spaces. Looks pretty chaotic, I hope it works OK.

Word Tower (unplayed) - I like the look of this - you encode a word as a series of coloured disks and the other players try to find a word that matches. I haven't found anyone else interested in it at all.

New Games Played On Holiday

So here's why I've been so quiet since Scrabblette got back: we've been on holiday. We went down to the Blue Mountains to Euroka Homestead for a week with some other gamers. Not to say that Scrabblette is a gamer, but she can approximate one when she needs to. We did a couple of trips into Sydney to visit friends and do some of the tourist things including seeing an exceedingly dull exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Luckily, I played several new games during the week.

Flaschenteufel - this is a nasty little card game where one player gets screwed each hand. It's fun to plan for it to not be you. I think with experience it would be excellent.

Expedition - ho hum and double ho hum. This game reminds me a lot of Australia which I really don't like. Luckily the theme doesn't suck anywhere near so bad. I dislike both of them because some players can have long turns and get heaps of stuff, often leaving other players to have a boring turn and get nothing. Maybe that's because those players have skill, but maybe it's just because the games suck? Anyway, I wasn't excited by it at all.

Mü - I'd heard good things about this so I was keen to try it, and as we went through the rules it sounded exciting. Soon I realised it sucked. My fundamental problem is that if 1s are trumps I can have a blue 1 and not be allowed to play it on a blue trick. I know why, I know it's the rules, it just sucks. If I wanted to play a game where some trumps changed suit I'd play 500.

Phoenix - I played half a game of Phoenix and quite liked it. I'll have to buy my own copy and play some more.

Carcassonne - Hunters and Gatherers- I like the idea of a different Carcassonne with nicer tiles, but as I played it I realised that the different tiles just made the board look busy and the bonus mechanism, although it encouraged people to complete forests, wasn't very exciting most of the time. The game seems to be a bit more complex than the original with not many advantages to compensate. Ho hum.

Mystery Rummy: Murders in the Rue Morgue - Not really a new game, as the kid and his mum and I have played this many times. However it was new to play 4 players which made the game a very interesting partnership game. We played against our usual Tichu opponents, and I liked it a lot.

Elefantenparade - I like the theme of this game, I liked the simplicity, but it has really failed to deliver both times I've played it. The first time I got by the world's biggest ever kingmaker move, and the second time we got stuck in analysis paralysis trying to figure out how to prevent people from winning. Scrabblette suggested playing in two teams of two so that you can validly choose to help your partner and avoid kingmaking. I hope to try that.

Take it Easy - This is a weird little game which is half solitaire puzzle and half solitaire puzzle. Umm, let's add that up. I don't know if it's actually very interesting.

My Word! - This is the sort of word game I'm very good at. Everyone else played for second place. That means I like it a lot but will rarely get it to the table.

The Battle of Lanka - Scrabblette brought me this from India. It's a simple card game and I was worried that it might not work at all. We played three games with CyberKev and Mrs CyberKev. The first two games were won after one turn when the first player felt they'd got lucky with the deal and were in a strong enough position to win. In both cases they were right. We then decided that it should be compulsory to play all the way through the deck, which rule change caused us to play the game we thought the designer probably wanted to design. It was OK - nothing super, but an interesting experience.

Maharaja: Palace Building in India - I've been looking forward to playing this for a while, but I was amazed as I heard the rules that you could do so little on a turn. It didn't seem right to me. It turned out that the rules work OK but I can't add 12 and 2 and managed to screw up my first turn. I struggled to find a strategy based on screwing up your first turn and lost interest as the players who were doing well took their time making moves. I'd like to play again, but maybe just with Scrabblette for a while. She liked and beat me in the 4 player game.

That's all the new games I played while on holiday, but some other things happened on the way back home. There's a shop called Mal's Toy Store on the highway in Taree so of course we pulled over and had a look. They had a copy of Batik for a good price, which my FLGS has not so far supplied, so I bought that. I was going to buy 50c worth of lollies but the nice lady gave them to me. Then she mentioned she hadn't learned Tantrix so she couldn't sell it, so I showed her how to play the solitaire version.

Later in the day we stopped at The Big Banana. There's a puzzle shop next door, so we took a look. I found two games I'd never heard of called Landlord and Spin and Trap, and it turns out that BGG hadn't heard of them either. So I bought them for $A30 each. Scrabblette and I tried to play Landlord while eating a banana split but we didn't really understand the rules and have to try it again with our improved understanding. At the same shop Scrabblette bought a word game called Snatch which leaves an opening for some pretty appalling double entendres which I won't go into here.

I had a good session of Batik with BIL this evening, and although it's not a brilliant game it works OK. It LOOKS beautiful. I love Gigamic games - I have 3 now and plan to acquire more. After watching BIL and I play, 6yo nephew demanded a game and played against Scrabblette... he kicked her butt. He's a gamer, that lad, you mark my words.

Anyway, that's most of the gaming news from the holidays. Maybe I could tell you the story about... nah, if I even tell you what the story's about Scrabblette will... er, better not say that either.