As If It Really Needed To Be More Difficult

So I'm back from my little out-of-town-excursion. And to all of you who laugh at my Mjolnir Horn idea, just you wait until I get Mjolnir, and. . . do all sorts of good things with it, because I wouldn't be worthy of it otherwise.

But once I've convinced the hammer I'm worthy, you better just watch the skies, 'cause WALT SIMONSON SOUND EFFECT!! Then you'll see.

Anyway, you don't have to worry about it for awhile. I'm feeling pretty mellow after yesterday. Visited friends, had some fun, observed the wonder that is a three-legged dog trying to hop onto a couch, played some games. I'm sure you'd all love to hear about the Adventures of Ann, The 3-Legged Dog, and her struggles against the Evil Pup Molly, but instead you get to hear about games. I told you to watch the skies, and "skies" clearly means "blogs".

Arkham Horror: Yeah, I've gone over this game once before, but this time Bess had the Dunwich Horror expansion, which. . . had very little effect on the game, other than making take even longer to set up. I think it would have gone better with more than four people. The expansion is basically an additional section of board to play on, similar to the regular board, except there are three gates. If a monster appears in Dunwich, it will more to one of the gates and enter it. If all three gates have a monster enter, then the Dunwich Horror shows up. Like we weren't going to have enough trouble with C'Thulu. Fortunately, only one monster ever appeared in Dunwich, and it was stationary, so no harm done. Other than that, the game didn't play all that differently from the last time, except we got beat this time around. The four of us just couldn't roll well enough to take out the Big Bad.

Thurn and Taxis: The goal is to establish postal routes between towns in, I believe, 19th century Germany. Well, the various Germanic city-states is more likely. The game revolves around you drawing cards with different towns on them. There are intially six laid out you can choose from, or you can draw off the top of the pile, or use a special ability (I'll get back to that in a moment). You try and draw towns that are connected by a road (the board is basically a map). You can score your route at any time, as long as there are at least three towns in it. You can make the route as long as you like. There are four special abilities, of which you can use one each turn. One allows you to pick two cards, instead of one. Another allows you to play two cards instead of one. One allows you to have the six cards laid out discarded, and a new six drawn. The other power relates to the cartwright.

See, as you make route, you get a certain wagon built by the cartwright. When you build your first route, you get the 3-city wagon, regardless of the actual route length. Then comes the four, five, six and seven. In each case, the route you build can include more towns than that, but you still have to get the four before the five, and so on. The final special ability lets you get credit for a certain length route, even if your route is two shorter than that. So if you want to score a route of five cities, you could use that ability, and make it count as a seven (you'd still have to have collected the six at some point previous, though). And there's points to be had, depending on how far you get on that. You also have to place buildings in the cities, and try and get a building in all cities of a certain color, and some other scoring aspects such as that. I did very poorly, while Papafred smoked the rest of us. And he says he usually doesn't do well on games.