Day Seven

We played a Cuarenta tournament for most of the time, followed by free time to play things for everyone who had not made it into the final round. My team was knocked out in the quarterfinals after some very high tension preliminary games. One was at 38 points for both teams for a very long time, and another was won very quickly because our opponents had gotten a Bye, so we got a 10 point headstart.

By the time we finally lost, we were sick of Cuarenta, so we started playing 7 Wonders with a few people who had not yet learned it. It was interesting trying to teach the new players when half of the group had played before and was trying to give advice and the other half kept popping in and out of the game. We got most of the way through before a guest speaker began his presentation.

I was surprised at how many of the games on his list of favorites I had heard of, as well as how many I never knew existed. I am glad we had someone come in and make having a large collection of games sound like something to aspire to. It was also nice to hear about the community that exists here in West Michigan to play board games. I expect I may need to get involved with that once college is over and I need to find willing gamers again.

Day Six

Stone Age

This game involves placing cavemen in different locations on the board and rolling the dice to see how many resources those cavemen gather and what they build with them. The gameplay seems a lot like Agricola to me in that it involves worker placement for benefit redemption. We only got to play about half of the game, and were finally getting to the point where we could build huts by the time we needed to stop, but we all agreed that it was a really complex and interesting game. I would have rejoined my group to play this again at the party, but decided against it so that I could learn a different new game. I hope to get the opportunity to play it through to completion sometime in the future though.

Cuarenta

This is a card game from Ecuador that the entire class learned. We started with the basics of how to play the cards to capture matches and how to score and slowly added more and more instructions after each game until we had the full version of the game. It was very confusing at first and I wished that some table had been made the example for us to watch a round of, because that would have alleviated all the questions that arose at the beginning of the game. Once we got the hang of each rule change and had all the details on scoring it became a much more entertaining game than we originally had the impression of it being. When we were supposed to be finishing up my group had just dealt another hand and we were getting good enough at it to be quick enough to finish the round in a few short minutes. This is the game that we are playing Friday as a class, so I hope we got enough practice in to be good at it!