Post-Christmas games binge review

This Christmas break was amazing. I didn't get in my weekly post because I was so busy with everything else that was going on during break. And by everything else I mean playing games. But I'm back at school and blogging again.

During break I played a lot of new games, most of which I had never played before, including a lot of new ones that we got for Christmas.  Following are some of my thoughts.

Seafall: Seafall was an incredible game and an incredible experience. I loved it. It was my first time ever playing legacy game, (and Ryan's as well), and it was a blast to be able to change everything about the game. From the cards themselves to upgrading your own province board to making your ships better, it was awesome being able to change things for future games. The best part though for me was being able to discover islands. Sailing out into the wild unknown waters and using an explore action to see if you could discover an island was so amazing. I was the first one to do it in my game. And while I was not the first one to set up a colony on one of the islands, I was the first one to get three, getting me that milestone. Like in Eric's blog, it's really hard to not talk about the best, most exciting moments of the game because of spoilers, but let me just say the stuff in those little boxes is awesome. The entire game felt like an epic story to me, unfolding a secret past history of the sea that we slowly uncovered and discovered. All in all it was a great game and I had a great experience. It's too bad I can't go back and do it again, not in the same awe-inspiring way, because uncovering the secrets was one of the best parts. There was one time when we knew what we had to do, but weren't sure how the game would know when to trigger itself when it happened, but as it turned out everything happened smoothly and the game knew just what to do with itself. I can't wait to play another legacy game, such as Pandemic: Season 2, coming out later this year.

Viticulture: I love this game. I can't even explain really why, but this game is so fun and amazing. I just love the fact that you can use your workers in summer OR winter, but not both, and how your grapes in the crush vats and your wine in your cellar age at the end of every turn--I love those mechanics. And the visitor cards give a whole new spin on everything. This game is just great, and definitely one of my favorites of all time.

My Village: I like this game a lot better than regular Village. There's the amount of growth you literally see in front of you as your village gets bigger and progresses. It's the cool fact that you have five guys and once one of them dies you need to replace them to keep doing that part of your village. But mostly it's the dice. That glorious mechanic of that dice pool. I love how you can pick any two dice to add up to the number you want. I love the fact that there are the black dice which you can pick, but cost you two time to do so. I love how you can activate your buildings with them depending on what number is on the banner. It just all comes together for me so neatly and clearly. But yeah, picking two dice from that dice pool is just a great mechanic.

Mystic Vale: It was so fun to be able to construct your own cards. Which pieces fit together the best? Will that card part even come up when this is out there? Building up supercards was one of the best parts of the game. And I like how when you spoil you get that one-shot free mana, but man, spoiling! I hate spoiling! But when you can pull it off--wow, you're feeling good about yourself. I haven't played it enough to get all little tricks and dig into all the corners and niches that this game has to offer, but I hope to soon.

Codenames: This was quite a fun party game. And it was a lot shorter than I was expecting it to be. I was expecting a game to last around a half hour, but most games only lasted from about 10 to 15 minutes. And it was fun being both the person giving clues and the person pointing at words based on those clues. They are about equally fun in my mind, because with one you can make awesome clues, but have to wince inside when your team just doesn't get it, and with the other you can try to extrapolate what the code master meant and try to delve into their thought processes.

Castles of Mad King Ludwig: This game was really fun. I loved being able to construct my very own castle, and loved how the extra points on the room tiles made sense. The meat locker wants to be attached to an outside room to let out the smell. The theatre loses points if it's next to a sleeping room because the noise coming from it would wake up the guests. It was little things like that that made playing so much fun. Plus, you even got to set the prices of the rooms every go around. My trick was not placing the rooms my opponents wanted too far out of reach, but I'd put them just low enough so that they would justify buying it and I would reap the profit.

Imhotep: This game was really simple, and thus fun. You grab stone, place stone, or sail. And that's it. Yet the game remains competitive and tense as you try to balance those three very simple things. Timing is so critical to this game. I only barely barely won my first game I played by one point.

Istanbul: Letters and Seals: This is a really good expansion. I don't see myself playing with it all the time though, because Istanbul by itself is so polished and tight and close to perfection in a game. The expansion adds a whole lot of neat nifty stuff, but as a result also adds a little bit of complexity and AP. With the added piece you can move it increases options on your turn and also the likelihood you'll have to pay two lira when you go to a spot. But it was definitely a lot of fun; all of the new added stuff is solid.

Caverna: Like Agricola, but you feel more free in this game to choose your own path. In Agricola you were always worried about feeding your workers and getting tons of every animal so that you didn't go negative, but in Caverna both of those problems are fixed.

Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn: I played with Alex twice. I lost the first one terribly, but almost one the second one. I was so close! I like how it's a card and dice game, with the dice activating card powers, and some card powers allowing you to change dice. The card drafting thing would have been so neat to do, but there was just no time this vacation.

Shakespeare: This game only lasts six rounds, which is incredible, because you think you won't be able to get anything done, and then by the end you look back and think, wow, I got a lot done. I really liked this game.

Alhambra and Fresco: I loved the city building of Alhambra with the wall thing, and I loved how if you paid for a city tile exactly you got to go again, and I loved how you could only pay for a tile using only one type of currency. It's a good game, and Heather really liked it too and was excited when she learned that we also got a copy. I loved the hiding-the-workers part of Fresco, where you reveal where your guys are going at the same time. But I don't know if this is just me but the only place where that really mattered was the market. It seemed like any other place it didn't really matter as much. Oh, and painting the ceiling too I guess because they might paint the section that you were going to paint, or move the abbot away from the place you would have gotten bonus points from. And I liked the getting-up-time mechanic, similar to the one in Viticulture. Plus, the mixing colors together to get other colors is just genius.

Treasure Hunter: A fun game. It has this really cool card drafting mechanic where you want to lowest in a suit or the highest in a suit, but not the middle of a suit, and so you're trying to build up a team based on their rank number to get highest or lowest. Plus there are dogs and coins and weapons and all sorts of crazy things. Also, a short game. That won a lot of points with me; I love shorter games.

Hey, that's my fish!: A simple game that can get deep if you want it to. My wife got me this for Christmas. I first played it with Brandon earlier last year.

Kingdom Builder: This was a fun little game. It's not super deep, like other games I like, and it is kind of annoying having a one-card hand (a hand of card?), but other than that it's pretty solid. I love how with the expansions it adds a ton of new goal cards, because those three goal cards are the focus of the game, and I'm a sucker for variety.

Dominion expansion cards: Speaking of variety, I got a whole bunch of new Dominion cards! Some of which no one has ever played with before because they're from the new second edition games that just came out. We actually didn't play this over the break though....

We made a list of who won what game with how many points and how many players were playing. I think Alex is doing some math to crunch some numbers to determine who is the overall Christmas break games champion. Or something like that.

In other non-game related news: The Fitbit challenge! My family is doing a Fitbit challenge where we see how many steps we get in one month. It averages out to about 7,000 steps a day I think. Because I walk to the bus stop to and from school every day, I easily rack up over 20,000 steps in one day. Plus as a teacher I'm up in the front of the class teaching too, so things are going well for me. But it's so funny, because now I love waking around and even go out of my way to do it now so that I get more steps to beat everybody else. So the challenge is working--it's getting me to exercise more. Right now I'm in first place. :)

Heather and I saw Moana over the break (thanks Hannah!) and it was great.

And everyone made it safely home! I'm so grateful that we were blessed with safe travels. Heather, Henry and I made it home safely, despite horrid Salt Lake City roads, and Eric and Ryan managed to make it to BYU-I safely, and my mom and dad made it back home to Fallon safely, all of which I am incredibly grateful for.