Posted on December 27, 2012
Holiday Haul
We found some decent games under our Festivus pole this year.
We haven’t had a chance to play Game of Thrones yet since it requires three players but we’ve gotten in a couple rounds of the others (if you count playing Settlers and Seafarers of Catan online pretty much nonstop). The Hobbit Legos is basically a memory game with a couple of extra twists. It’s easy enough for a seven year old to pick up instantly but still engaging enough for an adult that it won’t bore you to tears if said seven year old wants to play it nine times in a row. The best part though is that the board is made out of Legos so you get to build it all before you play.
Spam dice is relatively Yahtzee-like but with Spam-themed images on the dice. Fast, simple, and amusing. Something we grabbed on a whim while we were at the Spam Museum in Austin.
Dungeon Lords is designed by Vlaada Chvátil, the guy who made Galaxy Trucker, and it’s just as awesome. All the players run their own dungeon and try to get it beefed up with monsters, traps, and miscellaneous rooms before a pesky band of adventurers shows up. It involves a fair bit of resource management in the same vein as (but simpler than) Agricola and some combat. It’s surprisingly easy to learn and it’s hella fun.
On a related subject, a lot of our games are of the German “thousands of tiny wooden pieces” variety and a friend of ours introduced us to a handy way to organize them. As it turns out, bead organizers that you can get at craft stores are perfect for keeping game pieces separate and will fit nicely in board game boxes. Here’s Agricola:
Pretty swanky, eh?
That’s a smarter way to do it than bags, is it will work as a bank as soon as you open it. Pisser is finding one that fits in the box, but that’s exactly the kind of question that keeps the soulless automatons at the Container Store functioning throughout the cold millenia.
I confidently predict that Noe will hate Game of Thrones. But Dungeon Lords looks like a lot of fun. Is it tile based? Czechs like their tile-based games like Germans like deforestation.
Also: Bring these for show and tell tonight if’n you feel like it!
I love the shit out of Game of Thrones, and I think there might be enough fluff from the books to keep Noe from hating it. It’s still the kind of game she hates, but there’s lots to like besides the mechanics.
She was the one who gave it to me so she has to play it. She was aware that it was “Risk-like” (or Risk-esque, if you will) when she got it but she was still interested in playing.
As for finding trays that fit the box, that has been tricky but we measured the boxes and some of the pieces in advance so we pretty much knew what would work.
DL does have some tile elements to it (the actual dungeon that you build) but there are several other parts to it. We’ll bring it along tonight. Here’s the layout as we played it the first time: http://i332.photobucket.com/albums/m324/antrobus178/dungeonlords.jpg