Games, Games, Games!

Once again, I have braved the trip from my humble stomping grounds, to the big, scary suburbs, that are home to friends Papafred and Tomato. And, once again, I have returned safely from said trip, feeling quite mellow thank you, and with new gaming experiences that are fun for the whole family*.

No Thanks: Last time I returned from this sojurn, I talked about For Sale. No Thanks is essentially For Sale in reverse. Or reversed. Something like that. There are 33 cards, numbered 3-35. You remove 9, without looking at them, and set them aside. Then one at a time, a card is flipped over. You can either take the card, or pay a token to not take the card. People can keep paying for as long as they've got tokens (provided they don't want the card), but once you're out of tokens, you have to pick up the card. The mitigating factor is that you keep all the tokens that were paid on that card up to that point.

At the end, you add up the total numbers of all your cards, and subtract how ever many tokens you have. Also, if you have a consecutive sequence of numbers (say 11, 12, 13), you would only count the 11, so there's a bit of strategy to it, and it's 20 minute game, roughly.

Wits and Wagers: Like Trivial Pursuit, with gambling. Or Price is Right, with actual knowledge. Sorry, I don't consider knowing prices of applainces knowledge. But I do consider knowing how many turkeys Americans consume at Thanksgiving (45 million?!) to be knowledge. Odd.

A question is asked, everyone takes their marker and dry eraseboard, and writes down what they think the answer is in 30 seconds. Then the cards are arranged on what looks like a betting table from smallest to largest. See, it's always some numerical question, like "What year did Columbus reach South America?", or "How many times more volume does the Sun have than Earth?" Then you have 30 seconds to bet on which answer you think is closest (without going over, and you can also bet that the true answer is lower than all the guesses). You can bet a max of ten, betting all of it on one answer, dividing it between two, betting just five, or even bet none. Whichever person had the closest guess (without going over) gets ten monetary units, and whoever bet on that answer gets the labeled payoff as well. The way it's set up, the answers on the extremes pay higher than the answers in the middle (up to 4 to 1).

For the record, I won the first game on the strength of being one year off on the first year sound was in a movie (I guessed 1922, it was 1923), and I also got that Sun's volume question (I guessed a million, it was 1.3 million, nobody else guessed higher than 200. I love being a childhood astronomy nerd.) The most amusing part was watching Papafred's sister consistently write "1700" for any question about years, including the Columbus one. I weep at the American educational system. OK, I guessed wrong too, but I was only off by like five years (it was 1498, remember, it said "South America", not "the Americas", or "the New World").

Bohnanza - You're a bean farmer!? It's more fun than it sounds. There are different beans. You plant them, but you can only plant two types at a time, three if you purchase the 3rd field with the money you make harvesting. You can trade bean cards you have, for bean types you want during your turn with anyone, which can lead to some interesting haggling, and lines like 'What will you give me for my Stink (Bean)?' Up to a certain point, you can keep planting more of a bean in a field, and make more gold when you harvest, but you also have to look at the cards in your hand - which you can't shuffle, you have to use them in the order they were received - to see if you're going to be better off harvesting now, and starting anew. One with the most gold after three turns through the deck wins.

Pitch Car - This was probably the oddest, which given what I just described above is saying something. You build a race track, like it was Hot Wheels, and each person takes a turn flicking (with their fingers) a little wooden disc with a car painted on it around the track. This determines "pole position" with fewest flicks getting first, and so on. Then you start the actual race, with first to finish three laps being the winner. There's turns and guard rails, though they don't do much if you flick too hard (a common issue for me and Papafred's other sister). If you go off the track, you go back to where you flicked from. That also applies if your flick knocks someone else off the track, so no Tony Stewart antics (that's me appealing to the NASCAR fans among us)! After playing that, I concluded I lack fine motor control.

Citadel - This was kind of fun, not too hard to pick up, but it lacks interaction between the players. You want to build eight districts within your city. These can range from things like taverns and markets, manors, cathedrals, haunted cities, prisons, etc. There are 8 roles to play, and each round one of those cards is removed, then the other seven are passed around, starting with whomver picked the King last round. Each person selects a role, and then you go through one at a time, with each role getting a chance to go starting with the one numbered 1 (Assassin), up to 8 (Warlord, not "Warlock" as certain people kept saying). Each role has certain powers, with the Assassin being able to kill one of the other characters during their turn turn (thus making that character miss their turn), the Warlord being able to pay to destroy another player's district each turn, the Bishop being safe from the Warlord, plus receiving money for each district with a blue (holy) symbol on it. Once someone gets eight districts built, that'll be the last round, tally up the cost of the things you built, plus points if you have districts of all five colors, plus points for being the first done, and so on.

To get to eight districts, you'll have to either draw district cards, so as to have things to build, or borrow gold, so as to have the money to build them. I think you can play it either by focusing on what you need, or by trying to figure out what your opponents will do, and working against that. For example, I had the six districts, and only one other player had even five. I figured someone would try to slow me down by using the Warlord to smash one of my districts, so I chose the Bishop (fortunately he was still available). The Assassin wasn't drawn that round (or didn't target me, I forget), and so my city was safe from reprisals while I collected money from my church, and built a cheap little tavern for district #7. The next round, the Bishop and Warlords were gone, so I chose the Assassin, then used him to kill the Warlord, took two more gold from the bank, and built my eighth district. And I pulled out the narrow victory (26 points to Tomato's 22).

Still, more interplay with the other characters would have been nice, probably why I like Arkham Horror more.

*May not result in fun for the whole family, if, you know, you're family of jerks who don't like fun.