Jan 22

The past few days have been pretty interesting, because they've been the games that the people who are teaching are unfamiliar with. This makes it a tad easier to get into, because you don't feel like you're working against insurmountable odds as much. On Tuesday we played Carcassone, which is one I've heard about quite a bit. I really enjoyed it, because there's a lot of strategy that goes into making sure you control certain things without ceding to your opponents. One aspect I noticed was taking gambles on what tiles you have. I was building a large castle, and as it went on it began to take up around 7-8 tiles. I took a gamble on making the castle that actually paid off for me, because with one of my final tiles I was able to complete it and get a large number of points. I also noticed how much work went into planning out a game like this. Each tile should be able to interact with the others in a way that allows the player to set it down, and the sheer amount of time that it took to plan all of this out so that it could work seems incredible to me. This was one of the first games where I looked at it and saw a large amount of complexity, and that really interested me.

On Weds, I taught Acquire in the first half. This one was a game I had played last Thursday at the game night, which I figured I knew well enough to teach, but was still confused enough as I played it that I would be on par with the other players. I ended up winning, but it wasn't without a lot of work. There's a ton of different ways to make money in that game, and you're constantly having to see how much stock the other players have to make it so that you have the best opportunity to win. I really like it, but it's actually kind of tiring with all of the mental work you have to do.

Finally we played King of Tokyo. Out of all of the games in the class I've played, this is perhaps the one I've enjoyed the least. It was alright, but I don't like games where there isn't at least a little strategy. There is a few ways you can win, but I ended up dying quickly in the first one and halfway through the second one, so I basically ended up watching the last two people duke it out for 20 minutes while we waited. I can see how for younger people, this game would be a lot of fun, but I didn't get a lot out of it personally.