In Which We Carry Boats Everywhere...

I arrived at Dragon's Lair a little early, and found Jeff and Chris playing Jambo. I was reviewing some player aids for some new-to-me games when Dennis arrived. We started a two-player game of Knights while waiting for Jambo to finish, but as soon as we had started Jambo finished! So Chris and Jeff joined in and we restarted... Knights is a dice-fest - you are rolling six dice three times trying to "beat" the dice shown on a card you are attempting to take into your hand. The twist is that any 6 you roll is dead - not useful in your hand, and cannot be re-rolled. The cards have different abilities, and the one we vastly underrated at game start were the "dice" cards, which gives you an extra die of a given number virtually - it's in addition to the six dice you are rolling. Chris got one of these early, and proceeded to use it to clean up. The game was still pretty tight, but there was no way to slow him down with that advantage.

As we wrapped (or rolled) up that game, Jon and Tiffany arrived, so we searched the bags for a six player game. Out came the odd little trivia game Fast Figure... In this game the answers to the question are always numbers from 1 to 100. Previously answered cards stay on the board, and the first person to put their answer card in the correct gap wins the question - so if the question is "number of US states at the time of the Pearl Harbor bombings", then Dennis would win if his answer card was down between the already-on-the-table 41 and 70. The game feels very frantic, and I've learned I'm no good at trivia-under-pressure - but it's fun to play the odds and drop your card in a "gap" of about 60 numbers... The game came down to the last hand, where Jon gathered enough points to come within 1 of Jeff, and Chris won the final question to race past me, leaving me in last.

Next out was the Dilbert version of The Great Dalmuti, called Corporate Shuffle. I have nothing much to say about this one, except that executive leadership stinks and art imitated life - I remained stuck in the lower-middle-class of the corporate world.

Tiffany needed to leave at this point, saying something about us giving her a pain in the neck I believe (hope that gets better!), and we pulled out a Tanga cheapie called Tongiaki. I actually really like this game - there are only a few actions you can take each turn, but it can still be a brain burner. Everyone populates "islands" with their boats, and once a beach is full the small fleets ship out in search of new islands and territory to explore. You need help, since ocean passage is treacherous - if you uncover an ocean tile with a number, you need at least that many different colors of boats (each player is a color) to survive the trip. The person who initiated the journey chooses the dispersement of ships on the new island if everyone survives. Each island has a point value between 2 and 5, and you score at game end for each island you have a boat presence on. The few other times I've played this game there are many an opportunity to screw your neighbor as you ship everyone ELSE'S boats off to certain doom at sea - but in this game the concept of islands was slightly skewed. I think we wound up with two large land masses at game end... there was still plenty of strategy available, but not nearly enough ocean voyaging, or watery graves. It seems like boats were not the optimal travel vehicle for the game we played...

Our final game was Prophecy, an RPG that with the two-treasure variant clocked in at just over 90 minutes with five players. This game is a lot of fun, and incredibly frustrating all at the same time. Gathering items, experience, and bonuses you build your combined "strength" and "willpower", and battle monsters and villains with those strengths. There's tons to explore, and many different paths to take toward victory - but Dennis is the master of them all. The rest of us kept fighting monsters with three lives, only to lose the third battle... I wish I was better at this game, and think I'll try to study up some - some games just come to me naturally, and others I don't seem to grasp the correct strategy at all for several plays - and this one falls in the latter category. I at least got close to winning one of the treasures in this game - I was a turn away from grabbing my first one at game end - but it was far too little too late. All I know is next game I want to be the "Master of Pain" - that dude is cool.