private session. 3-player Crokinole, 3-player Sunda to Sahul, 3-player The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Game.
Players were Cherie, Kerry, myself.
Crokinole is a table-top target-shooting dexterity game.
Players have twelve discs to flick towards a target on a typically beautiful hand-crafted circular board. There is a 20 point, disc-sized impression in the center of the board. There is a circle around that, with blocking pegs, worth 15 points. Two more circles out side that worth 10 points and five points. A gutter outside that for discs that are out of play.
Players alternate turns flicking a disc towards the center. If there are discs from the opponent on board, at least one of them must be hit first. If player misses opponent's discs, he takes his disc out of play along with any other discs that were hit. In one variant, when a player is aiming for the center, with no opposing discs in play, the disc must fall within the 15 point circle.
A round ends when all discs have been shot. At that point the winner gets the difference of the players' scores. The game ends when a player reaches at least 100 points.
We took some time to play this old favorite, playing three games so we could alternate everyone partnering with everyone else.
We had a few 20 point hits, and that kept things interesting.
Final scores were:
Click here to learn more about Crokinole at BoardGameGeek.com.
Players were Cherie, Kerry, myself. New players to the game were: Cherie, Kerry. -1 had the first turn.
We spent 5 minutes going over the rules and setting up the game.
This is a puzzle tile-laying game with a colonizing theme.
The tiles are actual puzzle pieces representing a combination of land and water. These tiles must be played so that the land and water line up to make islands.
Players divide all the tiles amongst themselves face-up.
The turn sequence is: take a tile, place a tile, place a totem token on a node. Each player gets to execute the turn sequence twice. Tiles may be replaced if they're not playable at no expense. A node is a point at which land tiles meet.
There's nothing more to the basic game. Each token on a node scores a point. Tokens score two points on each node in a complete island.
The first advanced rule concerns lakes. A person who completes the final node in a lake gets to put a token in the lake. A lake score five points per node. A lake in a complete island scores ten points per node.
The next advanced rule concerns tribes. With this rule, when a player completes a node, he can add a token to the created node, or to an existing tribe on the island. A token in a tribe is worth the number of tokens in the tribe to each token.
The next advanced rule concerns Cooperation, which built on the tribes rule. Players must ask for permission to join a tribe of the tribes controlling player. This really wasn't at all a useful rule, I find, and should really be combined with the next rule for which it's significant.
The next advanced rule concerns Challenges. After placing a token, a player may choose an island, and pick one of his tribes to challenge another tribe. Dice are rolled to resolve the challenge and the winner replaces the top-most of the loser's token with his own in the loser's tribe.
The next advanced rule concerns Resources. After placing a token, a resource may be added to an island. The number of the resource must be less than the number of tokens on the island, less the number on other resources on the island. Resources add two times the number on the resource to the score of the player with the most tokens on the island. Four times, if the island is complete.
Game ends when a player plays his final token, or the final tile has been played, or when no more tiles can be played.
The game can be played turn-based or in real-time.
We played a real-time game with the basic rules and lakes.
Cherie and Kerry had a hard time finding the patterns in this game. Cherie seemed to enjoy making long chains of tiles, while Kerry deliberately checked pieces to see if they worked.
Needless to say, after having played against Karl and his lightning speed, I won this game, and Cherie and Kerry hope to never see this game again.
Game lasted 26 minutes. Final scores were:
Click here to learn more about Sunda to Sahul at BoardGameGeek.com.
Players were Cherie, Kerry, myself. I was a new player to the game. I had the first turn.
We spent 1 minutes going over the rules and setting up the game.
This is a die-rolling trivia game with a survivalist theme.
There's a yellow board and foot-steps winding from start to finish. There's clip-art that presumably evokes the idea of survival. Play: Roll die, answer question, move pawn if correct. Get to Finish first, win.
This game is fun only if the people playing it are fun -- MST3K-style commentary adds a lot to the game, if not a bottle of vodka. The game itself has a bland design, simple roll-the-die, answer-question, move-pawn mechanic. The questions generally assume a context which is not given, or a knowledge of medical terms.
That being said, Cherie served a delightful fruit-flavored vodka, and we shared a great deal of laughter. For example, one question asked how one would drive off ice. One of the answers suggested one should choose to drive onto a frozen lake instead of a frozen river in the first place. Another question gave a medical term and the answers were what symptoms would be exhibited. Another question asked how to avoid a charging crocodile, and we debated the one answer of running in the opposite direction that the crocodile was charging -- wouldn't that mean I was running towards the crocodile, but in conventional language it means running away, right? In another question, how does one escape a car precariously balanced the edge of the cliff -- well, before I pick the answer that says crawl out the back window, I'd like to know which way the car's facing -- but, alas, context isn't given.
It's questions like those that take away from the supposed theme of the game; after all, being in a worst-case scenario isn't a choice, nor is it particularly useful to have a large vocabulary during a worst-case scenario.
Through Cherie took an early lead, Kerry and I caught up to her so that we were all virtually one roll away from the win.
Game lasted 104 minutes. Final scores were:
Click here to buy The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Game at FunAgain.com.
Click here to learn more about The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Game at BoardGameGeek.com.
