in photos: Robinson Crusoe, Chicken Cha Cha Cha, Pickomino

27 Apr 2014. I tried Robinson Crusoe Scenario 3 - Rescuing Jenny as a solo game.

After the shipwreck, she's stranded on another smaller island. She can't take care of herself and you need to build a raft to save her from that smaller island, and then build a lifeboat to leave the main island together before time runs out. I failed quite miserably. I did manage to get Jenny off the smaller island, but she was no help at all. She just ate the food and slept the whole day saying she needed to recover. I got Friday killed because I asked him to hunt some food for us. The wild beast turned out to be a cheetah, and it mortally wounded Friday. Sorry friend, rest in peace.

The inventions on the scenario sheet are not actually potential tools to help you with your mission. They themselves are the objectives of the mission.

One other factor that contributed to the loss was bad fengshui at my humble abode. I moved into a cave, i.e. from the beach tile on the left to the mountain tile in the middle, because it saved me the effort of building a shelter. However the mountain tile only produced one food, compared to the beach tile which produced one food and one wood. Towards the late game, I was short of wood and was nowhere near being able to build the lifeboat.

I was rather unlucky with exploration too. It took me a while to find any grassland, which I needed in order to make rope. I needed rope to make both the raft and the lifeboat. When I finally managed to make rope, I drew an event card that broke the rope, which meant another round of delay. Eventually time ran out on me. Maybe attempting this scenario as a solo game isn't such a good idea. I think I need more characters to share that burden named Jenny.

When Shee Yun saw me play, she said she wanted to play too. So after I lost the game, we set up Scenario 2, which she had not tried before. Scenario 2 is the exorcism scenario. We were quite lucky with the event cards, and the mysterious fog was slow to spread. It didn't hinder our cross building. Look at how happy she is to have won.

The white cubes are the fog, and the blue cubes the crosses. We had plenty of wood and managed to build the required five crosses quite easily.

Chen Rui wanted to play Kakerlaken Poker. This is nothing like Poker, except for a bit of lying and bluffing. Naturally she was no match for me when it came to lying.

We used card holders from 10 Days in Asia, something Chong Sean taught me.

Chen Rui loves playing Chicken Cha Cha Cha and often suggests it. I think it's because she has won a few times, so she remembers the game fondly. I'm not quite a fan. It's a memory game. If I apply a technique to help me memorise the tiles, I will usually win. When I'm too lazy to do so, I fare poorly. So the game feels like work to me.

I often need to negotiate with her to play other games instead.

I taught Chen Rui Pickomino, and she liked it. This is a dice game with a little maths, some risk evaluation and some risk management. But of course to her it's just rolling dice, adding up the numbers and catching worms (on the tiles).

We enjoyed taunting each other about snatching each other's unprotected tiles.