28 Aug 2019. I taught my colleagues Tyle and Jeixel to play Lost Cities, the classic two-player game from Reiner Knizia. This used to be the spouse game. It's only cards with numbers and colours, and yet the master designer has created something that is highly interactive and presents many difficult decisions. When they started playing, I was a little worried they would end up with negative points. In the end they did alright. It was satisfying to see them work out the tactics and to see the strategies click.
30 Aug 2019. A six player game of All Manor of Evil. The previous time I played, it felt impossible to survive till the second clock card was drawn from the deck. This time, the game ended with the second clock card. So it is not that impossible after all. I guess the first time I played we had more people incentivised to awaken one of the elder gods. This time round, only Ivan was desperate to awaken an elder god. For some others it was nice-to-have but not life-and-death. I needed to survive till the second clock card, and I tried to remove awaken tokens from the elder gods as often as I could.
We created a convention. The action card picked in the previous round, which may not be picked in the current round, is placed face-up in front of the player, so that everyone can clearly see it. Once the action card for the current round is picked, it is placed face-down and sideways overlapping the previous round card. It is easy to glance around the table to see if everyone has picked a card for the current round.
This was still early game - not many awaken tokens on the elder gods. Later on things became much more precarious.
In this particular game I used the #4 action frequently to get more treasures. The #4 action lets you claim the top card from the deck if it is a treasure. The risk is it might not be a good one, e.g. it might come with a high insanity value. I needed to get to the second clock card, so drawing more cards from the deck was good for me. In the second half of the game, I sensed that I probably had more victory points than everyone else, but I knew I was also high in the insanity department. I tried to discard insanity tokens, but unfortunately by game end I still had too many. As the game ended, only Ivan was eliminated due to his character traits. Of the five left, I had the most insanity, so I was next to get eliminated. I counted my victory points, and had I not gone crazy, I would have won. Too bad!
31 Aug 2019. I came across this Agricola phone wallpaper on social media. Unfortunately it didn't fit my phone well. The alignment is a little off.
4 Sep 2019. I taught my colleagues Love Letter. They had a lot of fun, even those watching. We used paper clips as score markers. Love Letter is a microgame with only 16 cards, but it does take some effort to teach, especially when explaining some of the interactions of the card powers. It is a joy to watch new players pick up the intricacies as they play.
9 Sep 2019. It had been four years since I previously played Carcassonne. I used to play a lot of Carcassonne, with my wife Michelle and with my Taiwanese friends. Over the years I have collected many expansions, big and small. What was new to us this time was the Half and Half expansion, from Spielbox magazine. This expansion features half tiles - the triangular tiles. There's one in the middle of this photo. At the start of the game, every player gets two half tiles. On your turn, you may forgo drawing a regular tile and play one of your half tiles instead. In the photo above, that completed castle on the right previously had one of my regular meeples. It had been stuck there for a long time because I couldn't draw the right tile to complete the castle. On the left, Michelle's (red) big meeple was eyeing my incomplete castle. If her incomplete castle and mine joined up, she would win majority and score, and I would get nothing. By playing my half tile I completed the castle on the right and released my meeple. I also locked up Michelle's big meeple because she didn't have the right half tile to play into that triangular space to complete that castle with her big meeple. This was terribly mean of me, locking up her important big meeple for the rest of the game.
I think the Half and Half is just so-so. The half tiles are helpful. You can save them for a crucial moment. However I think a big part of the fun of Carcassonne is hoping to draw something that's useful to you. So I find such a kind of better control unnecessary. So Half and Half is nice if you want to have a bit of variety, but it's just a novelty and is not necessary.
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