Family Game Night, Somerset upgrade

Yesterday Jacob held a Perazzo family family game night. He was the first one to notice that all five families were represented: Becky Jamison was there representing the Jamison family, Amanda was there representing the Loveland family, I was there representing the Glen Perazzo family, Megan was there representing the Alan Perazzo family, and Brandon and Jacob (the only family with more than one representative) were there representing the David Perazzo family. Everyone married had their spouse and kids along with them.

From left to right: Amanda, Juliet, Todd, Andrew, Jacob, Susan,
Heather, Henry, Megan, Brandon, Becky, and Calista.

Aren't all these kids just so cute?

Playing Camel Up with all the expansion modules
('cause that's what we do)

Henry and Juliet

When I got there Jacob was playing a game of 7 Wonders Duel with Brandon, and Calista and Susan were playing a Ravensburger game. Heather, Becky, Tessa, and I played a game of Hey! That's My Fish! and Heather won.

I played Splendor next with Jacob, Todd, and Amanda. It was the first time I'v ever played (even though during Christmas break I helped clarify some rules because I had read them a long time ago). It was super fun. It's quick, easy to learn, and fun. I ended up barely winning.

Pizza came and we ate that. Afterward, nearly everybody gathered around for a game of Camel Up. That game can support a lot of players. I was doing super well at the start of the first leg until another player threw a wrench in my plans, which ended up making me lose four coins the first round. I never caught back up. I really liked the new expansion modules. My favorite one would probably be where you can bet on 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th place. The one where you add dice is cool, but that's the whole reason I lost that first leg so I'm bias against it now.

That was the last game we ended up playing. Because nearly everyone has kids now it's more difficult to have longer game nights. Although I brought Somerset and showed it to Jacob we never got a chance to play it.

Speaking of Somerset, last week I mailed off both copies, one to my family in Fallon and one to my family in Rexburg. I know Eric and Ryan got theirs, but I haven't heard from Alex yet if they got theirs. After I mailed it to them on Tuesday I went to Clubs Night and play tested it with the Quark club. We tried five players and after two hours it still wasn't done. I was pondering on what to do and talked to Heather about it. I explained that you play until someone builds 12 tiles and she suggested that that was too much and I needed to make it less. So I changed it to 8 tiles. I play tested it that way and it was alright, but then I realized that most of the tiles and such were designed for a longer game, and that by cutting out the last third of the rounds you never got to do the stuff you might have spent all game leading up to, like casting spells. 

So I went back to the drawing board so to speak and I modified that game slightly. I changed the prices on about half the tiles, changed how much it cost to advance your workers, modified some of the government advancement tiles, change the crystal cost on some spells, and changed some of the starting tiles. Also you can now use other people's roads, but you pay them a coin every time you do so, so it incentives roadbuilding. I play tested that and it was a lot of fun. And it plays about 15 minutes per person. When I did a two player game it took about a half hour. When I did a three player game it took about 45 minutes, and when I did a four player game it took about an hour. Also, for a 4-5 player game I did away with the duplicate copies of each tile and just had one of each, which made the game simpler and kept the 4 player game's time under check. So, um, if I sent you a copy of the game already I'll be e-mailing you the exact changes I made on those rules so that you can update your copy. Sorry about that. But please play the current version you have now to see how that runs. Your version can only support up to 4 players due to my lack of meeples, but if you wanted to do 5 I'm sure you can find a substitute.