19 August 2007

Session Report for 19 Aug 2007

PLAYERS: Me, ABM, CJ, Libby, and Josh

We started off with a game of Pounce, as usual. It's our favorite warm-up game. Then Libby bowed out to go to a meeting. That left 4 of us to play Word Thief and Mexican Train. These games were new to CJ and Josh, and ABM and I haven't played them in a while. Thank goodness for the internet, so I could go online and refresh my memory as far as the rules!

--Word Thief is a card-based word game. Each card has a letter, a point value, and a suit. Basically, each player makes a word on her turn. If the word is made of cards that are all the same suit, it is all yours. If it is a mixed-suit word, then another player can steal it to make a new word with it. There are bonus points for using all your cards in one turn and for making words longer than 4 letters.

This game doesn't get great reviews on Board Game Geek. One of the complaints that I saw repeated was that all players could just stick to making protected words and take all the challenge out of the game. That may be true in theory, but my group didn't find it that easy to make protected words. Josh won our game by a big margin, but it was because he racked up bonuses for long words.

--Mexican Train is a domino game. There are many variants so if you want to play it with your friends, make sure that everyone knows the same rules. The basic idea is to get rid of all your tiles, either by matching pips at the end of your own row or the row that another player is building. It is a quick and easy game that is perfect if you want to chat while you play.

Libby came back to collect her husband and we played a couple rounds of Poison before they left. I don't usually get to play games with adults 2 weekends in a row so I enjoyed myself. With cooler weather on the horizon, this may turn into a regular date. I need to buy more games!

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