A friend of mine had a game day this weekend and I managed to teach Guillotine to an ardent non-gamer who was tagging along with her man, I came in a respectable third in an Agricola game where second and first went to friends of mine having their best games ever (the first coming in at 51 points using the E deck), and I did slightly better than usual in Race For The Galaxy. I also played a couple of new games.
First off,
Notre Dame is practically the epitome of Euro gaming. It's similar to, say, Puerto Rico in that you have a variety of factors you need to juggle in order to score the most points by the end of the game. In this case, the players are vying to be the be the best 14th century Parisian aristocrat. This is achieved in two ways. First off, you spend a lot of time managing action cubes among the various areas of your district, which allows you to send workers to increase the number of actions you have, the points you get, the money you earn, and various other basic systems. The money you earn helps in the second way: each round there are a random selection of three cards representing people you can bribe for game benefits, such as more action cubes to work with, more money, more points, and so forth. Now, the folks who you can bribe are also used to determine the rat count in your district, and if the rats ever get out of control, you'll suffer some terrible penalties. Things are further complicated by a card draft where you pass around the cards that determine where the action cubes can go in a given round. Finally, there's Notre Dame, which players will put cubes and money into to earn points. It's a fun game with a nice theme, playable in about an hour and not as complicated as Puerto Rico while providing a similar system managing, point collecting experience. On the other hand, it does seem like your standard Euro, so while I enjoyed it I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to rush out and buy it. Still, considering it well worth looking into.
Then I took my life into my own hands and played
Jungle Speed, a dexterity based party game that virtually guarantees injuries when it's broken out. I'd seen this played at various parties in the past and was glad to finally have a go at it, even if the experience was mildly painful. The way it works is that there is a deck of cards full of groups of similar patterns, with slight differences in shape and/or color among them. Then there's a wooden totem in the center of the table. Players take turns flipping over cards in front of them, and when two cards match those players have to be the first to grab the totem. The slow (or oblivious) player then has to take the cards that have piled up in front of the person who grab the totem first. Then there are cards that signify an all-grab (where the person who snags it first places their stack underneath the totem for the next poor bastard who's too slow on the pattern recognition uptake to suck up), an all-flip (to shake things up), and a "match by color" card that causes all hell to break loose. Whoever clears out their hand first and is able to walk away from the table wins. Okay, it's not that violent, but the house rules my group plays with declares the totem to be in play if it goes flying, so people occasionally wind up diving under the table/across the room/etc for the damn thing. Also, there are always occasions where two people grab the totem at the same time, which results in crushed fingers and the other players trying to interpret who has the superior grasp on the totem. In this game I walked away having been jabbed hard in the wrist, which I don't recommend, while helping another player find a Band-Aid for bleeding fingernail scratches, which is a distinct improvement over the game I heard about where someone's nose got broken. That said, Jungle Speed was a helluva lot of fun and makes for a great "well, we've been drinking, so we probably won't notice the pain as much" experience. It's well worth checking out if you're looking for something more violent than, say, Apples to Apples.
FnordChan
